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.

Elective ignorance was a great survival skill, perhaps the greatest.

Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.

THE CORRECTION, when it finally came, was not an overnight bursting of a bubble but a much more gentle letdown, a year-long leakage of value from key financial markets, a contraction too gradual to generate headlines and too predictable to seriously hurt anybody but fools and the working poor.

...She felt that nothing could kill her hope now, nothing. She was seventy-five and she was going to make some changes in her life.

Popularity has become its own justification.

Our visual cortexes are wired to quickly recognize faces and then quickly subtract massive amounts of detail from them, zeroing in on their essential message: Is this person happy? Angry? Fearful? Individual faces may vary greatly, but a smirk on one is a lot like a smirk on another. Smirks are conceptual, not pictorial. Our brains are like cartoonists - and cartoonists are like our brains, simplifying and exaggerating, subordinating facial detail to abstract comic concepts.