I guess I should have forgotten about it ages ago, but forgetting isn't something I'm very good at.

This thing about looking for someone less different... It only really worked, he realized, if you were convinced that being you wasn't so bad in the first place.

And mostly all I have to say about these songs is that I love them, and want to sing along to them, and force other people to listen to them, and get cross when these other people don't like them as much as I do.

He's at the chocolate teapot end of the competency scale.

Love, it turns out, is as undemocratic as money, so it accumulates around people who have plenty of it already: the sane, the healthy, the lovable.

contemporary poetry is a kind of Reykjavik, a place where accessibility and intelligence have been fighting a Cold War by proxy for the last half-century.

There had been times when he knew, somewhere in him, that he would get used to it, whatever it was, because he had learnt that some hard things became softer after a very little while.