“Most of us will still take nihilism over neanderthalism.”

“Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.”

“For reasons that are not well understood, war's codes are safer for most of us than love's.”

“The true thoughts that go on inside us are just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of, at most, one tiny little part of us at any given instant.”

“He cranks the condo’s AC way down at night and still most mornings wakes up soaked, fetally curled, entombed in that kind of psychic darkness where you’re dreading whatever you think of.”

“the psychological need to believe that others take you as seriously as you take yourself. There is nothing particularly wrong with it, as psychological needs go, but yet of course we should always remember that a deep need for anything from other people makes us easy pickings.”

“Perhaps what most of us perceive as the centers of ourselves are simply no longer needed. And we both know that the absence of function, in nature, means death. There is nothing superfluous in nature.”