…deep-diving love, a love that excavates you. It’s something you have to have before you die in order to have lived.

Dad always warned that it was misleading when one imagined people, when one sas them in the Mind's Eye, because one never remembered them as they really were, with as many inconsistencies as there were hairs on a human head (100,000 to 200,000). Instead, the mind used a lazy shorthand, smoothed the person over into their most dominating characteristic--their pessimism or insecurity (something really being lazy, turning them into either Nice or Mean)--and one made the mistake of judging them from this basis alone and risked, on a subsequent encounter, being dangerously surprised.

I'm not afraid of total failure. In the end, we're all just food for worms, so what are we so worried about?

For every man there exists bait he cannot resist swallowing.

Good bands you can kind of lose, then come back and realize they're still good.

In America, people of a certain age ask, 'Where were you when Kennedy was shot?' In my house you were more likely to be asked, 'Where were you when you first read 'The Catcher In The Rye?

...the deepest secrets about ourselves that we, in the ultimate act of humanity, will spare those we truly love.