What I discovered I liked best about striking out on my bicycle was that the farther I got from home, the more interesting and unusual my thoughts became.

Even at its most perceptive, sociology deals in abstractions.

The world is divided between kids who grow up wanting to be their parents and those like us, who grow up wanting to be anything but. Neither group ever succeeds.

It's possible to overlook character flaws of in-laws for the simple reason that you feel neither responsible for them nor genetically implicated.

I want that which is hilarious and that which is heartbreaking to occupy the same territory in the book because I think they very often occupy the same territory in life, much as we try to separate them.

As I drift back into sleep, I can't help thinking that it's a wonderful thing to be right about the world. To weigh the evidence, always incomplete, and correctly intuit the whole, to see the world in a grain of sand, to recognize its beauty, its simplicity, its truth. It's as close as we get to God in this life, and reside in the glow of such brief flashes of understanding, fully awake, sometimes for two or three seconds, at peace with our existence. And then back to sleep we go.

People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake.