There were about seventy-nine squillion people in the world, and if you were very lucky, you would end up being loved by fifteen or twenty of them.

That was his mother. When she wasn't crying over the breakfast cereal, she was laughing about killing herself.

I had to nurture those doubts as if they were tiny, sickly kittens, until eventually they became sturdy, healthy grievances, with their own cat doors, which allowed them to wander in and out of our conversation at will.

Maybe the best thing to do with favorite books is to leave them be: to achieve such exalted position means that they entered your life at exactly the right time, in precisely the right place, and those conditions can never be recreated.

I don't even feel as if I'm the center of my own world, so how am I supposed to feel as though I'm the center of anyone else's?

One has so many more opinions about what has gone wrong than about what is perfect.

There are many differences between a baby and an I-Pod. And one of the biggest is, no ones going to mug you for your baby.