she was so much a personality and so little anything else that even staring straight at her he had no idea what she really looked like.

I guess my life hasn’t always been happy, or easy, or exactly what I want. At a certain point, I just have to try not to think too much about certain things, or else they’ll break my heart.

Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.

It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.

Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.

Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.

The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.

The Mekons were kind of like the background music of my life.

Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular.

Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.

Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance

True strength comes from the mind and spirit.

And may I live the remainder of my life ... for myself may there be plenty of books and many years' store of the fruits of the earth!

That which compels us to create a substitute for ourselves is not the external lack of objects, but our incapacity to lovingly include a thing outside of ourselves

Now, I don't want to get off on a rant here, but guilt is simply God's way of letting you know that you're having too good a time.

I try my hardest to push the point that I am a feminist.

Taking delight in random encounters that come our way is a wonderful reminder that God is in control.

Good communication is the bridge between confusion and clarity.

I think I just had an evilgasm.

Reducing children to a test score is the worst form of identity theft we could commit in schools.

Whosoever enjoys not this life, I count him but an apparition, though he wear about him the sensible affections of flesh. In these moral acceptions, the way to be immortal is to die daily.