However gnawing a deficiency, satiety is worse... We are meant to be hungry.

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

Change is like that: you are no longer where you were; you are not yet where you will get; you are nowhere exactly.

Worse, the deadly accuracy of filial faultfinding is facilitated by access, by trust, by willing disclosure, and so constitutes a double betrayal.

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.

I first foreswore motherhood when I was about eight years old. ... [Children] were annoying. We were loud and sneaky and broke things. As an eight-year-old, maybe I was simply mortified by the prospect of being saddled with myself.

A boy is a dangerous animal.