“a traveler, the purer form, someone who collects impressions, dense anatomies of feeling but does not care to record them.”

“All along — not only since she left, but for a decade before — I had been imagining her without listening, without knowing that she made as a poor a window as I did. And so I could not imagine her as a person who could feel fear, who could feel isolated in a roomful of people, who could be shy about her record collection because it was too personal to share. Someone who might have read travel books to escape having to live in the town that so many people escape to. Someone who — because no one thought she was a person — had no one to really talk to.”

“Historically, philosophy does not have an impressive track record of answering questions about natural world in a decisive manner.”

“There are two kinds of people in the world: the kind who alphabetize their record collections, and the kind who don't.”

“I pause to record that I feel in extraordinary form. Delirium perhaps.”

“The truest form of love is how you behave toward someone, not how you feel about them.”