“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.”

“We believe in the wrong things, 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.”

“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.”

“You want meaning? Well, the meanings are out there. We're just so damn good at reading them wrong.”

“When it all come down to it, the thing that matters most in a relationship is principles [...] We have the same idea what’s right and what’s wrong, and that’s got us through any number of things. If you can have that with someone, then you’re most of the way toward love. Not just lover-love. Any kind of love.”

“meander, v."...because when it all comes down to it, there's no such thing as a two-hit wonder. So it's better just to have that one song that everyone knows, instead of diluting it with a follow-up that only half succeeds. I mean, who really cares what Soft Cell's next single was, as long as we have 'Tainted Love'?"I stop. You're still listening."Wait," I say. "What was I talking about? How did we get to 'Tainted Love'?""Let's see," you say, "I believe we started roughly at the Democratic gains in the South, then jumped back to the election of 1948, dipping briefly into northern constructions of the South, vis-a-vis Steel Magnolias, Birth of a Nation, Johnny Cash, and Fried Green Tomatoes. Which landed you on To Kill a Mockingbird, and how it is both Southern and universal, which -- correct me if I'm wrong -- got us to Harper Lee and her lack of a follow-up novel, intersected with the theory, probably wrong, that Truman Capote wrote the novel, then hopping over to literary one-hit wonders, and using musical one-hit wonders to make a point about their special place in our culture. I think.""Thank you," I say. "That's wonderful.”

“I don't mean that God made this happen to teach us something. Or to teach me something. How monstrously selfish would that be? I just mean that if we go through this thing and it changes us so much, you have to hope that it changes us for the better, right? If goodness can't come from bad things, it makes bad things unbearable.”