I don't personally like the e-readers they've come up with so far. I don't fetishize books, but I do like that they're solid and unchanging.

He wanted this someone to see how much he hurt.

Our lives look a lot more interesting when they’re filtered through the sexy Facebook interface. We star in our own movies, we photograph ourselves incessantly, we click the mouse and a machine confirms our sense of mastery.

Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.

Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.

It seems to me self-evident that if you have a life, things happen in it, and certain things do change; certain things end. People you know die.

Everything he did was at least partial and often total bullshit” (402).