“But I still has enough longing for that concept that I didn't want to dispel it completely. Meaning: I didn't want to tell Lily that I felt we'd all been duped by Plato and the idea of a soul mate. Just in case it turned out that she was mine.”

“At one point they'd repeated everything enough, and I wanted to tell them to stop showing the planes hitting the tower. We didn't need to see it again. And yet I didn't turn it off. Because I was hanging on every minute, wanting to be there when whatever was going to happen next actually happened.”

“Like most of Salinger's characters, she wouldn't be such a fuckup, you felt, if these fucked-up things didn't keep happening to her. ...We believe in the wrong things, I wrote, using the same pen Boomer had used on his arm. That's what frustrates me the most. Not the lack of belief, but the belief in the wrong things. You want meaning? Well, the meanings are out there. We're just so damn good at reading them wrong.”

“I collected their papers. The ones that blew into Brooklyn. They were just there at first. I didn't even know what they were. But once I did, I went all over the place, picking them up. I don't know what to do with them. I mean, they're meaningless now, but they still exist. You can't throw out something like that. You can't make them gone like that.”

“Here," she said. "This is for you.""I didn't really get you anything," I sputtered. "I mean, I didn't know that you were going to be here, and--""Don't worry. It's your embarrassment at not having the thought that counts.”

“I asked you what you wanted and you said you didn't want anything. And I told you I wasn't planning on giving you anything; I was planning on giving you something.”

“I want to believe there is a somebody out there just for me. I want to believe that I exist to be there for that somebody.”