she was so much a personality and so little anything else that even staring straight at her he had no idea what she really looked like.

Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular. But the realism is merely a mask for depression's actual essence, which is an overwhelming estrangement from humanity. The more persuaded you are of your unique access to the rottenness, the more afraid you become of engaging with the world; and the less you engage with the world, the more perfidiously happy-faced the rest of humanity seems for continuing to engage with it.

And Silence of the Lambs is a really smart book.

Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.

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.

Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists.

What he'd never understood about men in his position, in all the books he'd read and movies he'd seen about them, was clearer to him now: you couldn't keep expecting wholehearted love without, at some point, requiting it. There was no credit to be earned for simply being good.