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.

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.

But the first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone.

It's very liberating for me to realize that I don't have to step up to the plate with a plot that involves the U.N. Security Council.

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.

I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.

You see more sitting still than chasing after.