It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.

To me, the point of a novel is to take you to a still place. You can multitask with a lot of things, but you can’t really multitask reading a book.

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.

I look at my father, who was in many ways an unhappy person, but who, not long before he got sick, said that the greatest source of satisfaction in his life had been going to work in the company of other workers.

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

I guess my life hasn’t always been happy, or easy, or exactly what I want. At a certain point, I just have to try not to think too much about certain things, or else they’ll break my heart.

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