My capacity for having a good time exists. It surfaces, however, on odd occasions.

People have been modeling their lives after films for years, but the medium is somehow unsuited to moral lessons, cautionary tales or polemics of any kind.

There is a difference, of course, between real sentiment and the trash of shared experience.

Do you realize how angry you sound?” must be one of the most infuriating questions in the language.

My dislike has no consequences. It accrues only in my mind—like preserves on a shelf or guns zeroing in, and never firing.

And then there were the wallflowers who had recognized for years that the thing was hopeless, who had found in that information a kind of calm. They no longer tried, with a bright and desperate effort, to sustain a conversation with somebody's brother, somebody's usher, somebody's roommate, somebody's roommate's usher's brother... The category of wallflower who had given up on all this was very quiet, not indifferent, only quiet. And she always brought a book.

Self-pity” is just sadness, I think, in the pejorative.