How we love to love things for other people; how we love to have other people love things through our eyes.

If you can't love crudeness, how can you truly love mankind?

Adolescence-is it the first time in life we discover that we have something terrible to hide from those who love us?

...I suddenly realized what small towns are. They are places where you grow up with the peculiar-you live next door to the strange and the unlikely for so long that everything and everyone become commonplace.

Life," Garp wrote, "is sadly not structured like a good old-fashioned novel. Instead an end occurs when those who are meant to peter out have petered out. All that is left is memory. But even a nihilist has memory.

She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything--maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.

I always know more about the ending, even the aftermath to the ending, than I know about the beginning. And so there's a construction that works from back to front.