And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool; because whom would this leave to be ordinary?

Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.

Everything he did was at least partial and often total bullshit” (402).

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

When you stay in your room and rage or sneer or shrug your shoulders, as I did for many years, the world and its problems are impossibly daunting. But when you go out and put yourself in real relation to real people, or even just real animals, there’s a very real danger that you might end up loving some of them. And who knows what might happen to you then?

There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it's the right unhappiness.

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.