The Web, the great time-killer that had replaced conspicuously passive television with its seductive illusion of productivity.

The secret is that there is no secret.

...whenever a woman describes a man as sweet, the dalliance is doomed.

No eleven-year-old has any real grasp of death. He doesn't have any real concept of other people--that they feel pain, even that they exist. And his own adult future isn't real to him, either. Makes it that much easier to throw away.

...hoarders of guilty secrets are inevitably consumed with appearances.

Yet Irina had once tucked away, she wasn't sure when or why, that happiness is almost definitionally a condition of which you are not aware at the time. To inhabit your own contentment is to be wholly present, with no orbiting satellite to take clinical readings of the state of the planet. Conventionally, you grow conscious of happiness at the very point that it begins to elude you. When not misused to talk yourself into something - when not a lie - the h-word is a classification applied in retrospect. It is a bracketing assessment, a label only decisively pasted onto an era once it is over.

The Web, the great time-killer that had replaced conspicuously passive television with its seductive illusion of productivity.