But when, at the end of my sophomore year, I became a philosophy major and started doing my first seriously pretentious thinking, I became a vegetarian again. The kind of willful forgetting that I was sure meat eating required felt too paradoxical to the intellectual life I was trying to shape. I thought life could, should, and must conform to the mold of reason. You can imagine how annoying this made me.

The books could be completely worthless, and things we don't even read now could be considered the most important books.

Look, taste is clearly the crudest of our senses: this is scientifically, objectively factual. It is less nuanced. Eyesight is extraordinary - hearing, touch. I find people who devote their whole lives to taste a little strange.

These little daily choices that we're so used to thinking are irrelevant are the most important thing we do all day long.

I need an office, so I can have a place where I don't write.

[She] always knew he was a fiction but believed in him anyway.

Books are slow, books are quiet. The Internet is fast and loud.