You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.

Secrets bind and separate in strict accordance with who's in them .

...some people coddle their own afflictions the way others spoil small pedigreed dogs with cans of pate.

The pediatrician must have thought me one of those neurotic mothers who craved distinction for her child but who in our civilization's latter-day degeneracy could only conceive of the exceptional in terms of deficiency or affliction.

I was suffering from the delusion that it's the thought that counts.

History is made of empires, and the United States was by far and away the greatest, richest, and fairest empire that had every dominated the earth. Inevitably, it would fall. Empires always did. But we were lucky, you said. We got to participate in the most fascinating social experiment ever attempted.

The only way my head was going truly somewhere else was to travel to a different life and not a different airport.