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.

It offended his sense of himself, because he was an individual from an age of individuals, and a string of lights was, like him, an individual thing. No matter how little the thing had cost, to throw it away was to deny its value.

The figure of my father looms large in my imagination.

I feel that working environmentalists are, in the main, happier than armchair environmentalists.

But as far as being popular, yeah, I think Dave Barry is really funny.

But she was seventeen now and not actually dumb. She knew that you could love somebody more than anything and still not love the person all that much, if you were busy with other things.

Each new thing he encountered in life impelled him in a direction that fully convinced him of its rightness, but then the next new thing loomed up and impelled him in the opposite direction, which also felt right. There was no controlling narrative: he seemed to himself a purely reactive pinball in a game whose only object was to stay alive for staying alive's sake.