“If you’re subjected to enough great salesmen and salespitches and marketing concepts for long enough—like from your earliest Saturday-morning cartoons, let’s say—it is only a matter of time before you start believing deep down that everything is sales and marketing, and that whenever somebody seems like they care about you or about some noble idea or cause, that person is really a salesman and really ultimately doesn’t give a shit about you or some cause but really just wants something for himself.”

“Trust is weird,” my mother said. “People give it too easily, most of the time. Because somebody is attractive, they expect him to be good or honest. Or like pushy salesmen—somebody who carefully makes you feel like you’re emotionally obligated to trust them. Like you’re the rude one if you don’t. Trust is really something that needs to be earned. Hard earned. If somebody every says, ‘Don’t you trust me?’ Just say, “No, as a matter of fact.”

“You almost have to step outside yourself and look at you as if you were someone else you really care about and really want to protect. Would you let someone take advantage of that person? Would you let someone use that person you really care about? Or would you speak up for them? If it was someone else you care about, you'd say something. I know you would. Okay, now put yourself back in that body. That person is you. Stand up and tell 'em, "Enough!”

“And so, in the end, the question of markets is really a question about how we want to live together. Do we want a society where everything is up for sale? Or are there certain moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy?”

“Nobody ever feels just one way about another person, Margo. We're so much more complicated than that. I can see a million things you want from me, just like the million things I want from you. Some of them are wonderful. Some are awful. Some contradict each other, and some don't make sense at all. But none of those things matter, not really. What matters is what you do about them.”

“Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don't think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn't stop you from doing anything at all.”