“In the end, there probably isn't much difference between being in love and acting like you're in love. ”

“It's not like it ruined my life, I was going to say, but then I didn't. Because it occurred to me that maybe it had ruined my life, in a kind of quiet way--a little lie, probably not so vital, insidiously separating me from everyone I loved. ”

“Maybe love, like suffering, is relative. ”

“It doesn't matter what you do. In the end, you are going to be judged, and all the times that you're not at your most dignified are the ones that will be recalled in all their vivid, heartbreaking detail. And then of course these things will be distorted and exaggerated and replayed over and over, until eventually they turn into the essence of you: your cartoon.”

“I have to admit that most of the time I read in the same way that I smoke and chew gum and jiggle my leg a lot. I read a lot, but at the same time I’m not a particularly good or diligent or discriminating reader. I go through maybe close to a thousand or more books a year, but a lot of times I’ll only read bits and pieces of any one individual text. There are even certain works that are very important to me (Like Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, for example) that I probably haven’t ever read all the way through from beginning to end, just certain passages over and over. I tend to read at stuff, rather that through it, if that makes any sense, and maybe there’s something a little bit rodent-like about it, like a gerbil gnawing on woodchips in those, tiny, rapid obsessive bites.”

“You can go on like this for a very long time, and no one will notice. You keep thinking you're going to hit some sort of bottom, but I'm here to tell you: There is no bottom. ”

“There is a stage you reach, Deagle thinks, a time somewhere in early middle age, when your past ceases to be about yourself. Your connection to your former life is like a dream or delirium, and that person who you once were is merely a fond acquaintance, or a beloved character from a storybook. This is how memory becomes nostalgia. They are two very different things - the same way that a person is different from a photograph of a person.”