“We are either progressing or retrograding all the while there is no such thing as remaining stationary in this life.”

“The difference between a politician and a statesman is that a politician thinks about the next election while the statesman think about the next generation.”

“When I consider what some books have done for the world, and what they are doing, how they keep up our hope, awaken new courage and faith, soothe pain, give an ideal life to those whose hours are cold and hard, bind together distant ages and foreign lands, create new worlds of beauty, bring down truth from heaven; I give eternal blessings for this gift, and thank God for books.”

“The only other consistent thing in Billy’s life was his father. Billy didn’t call him that though. He’d always called him Pop. Billy’s Pop would have laughed at all that career day stuff. Pop didn’t have crazy hair but Billy was pretty sure he was a genius. Pop told him stuff they didn’t let you in on at school, like how there was supposed to be future stuff already, like moving sidewalks and monorails and jetpacks. Pop told him that the government had lied and screwed people out of all that stuff and the only reason we ever went to the moon was to bury Jimmy Hoffa up there.”

“I can’t stop and all I have is a word addiction. Conjunction-Junction really fucked me up as a kid. This is all childhood trauma that’s manifesting itself in word needles and I can’t find enough good veins.”

“I should write a serious book on China. If I did that and put in a lot of subtext about love and maybe compared it to the Great Wall or communism or something I could show the parallels between how we are forced to act in society due to cultural mores, versus how we really are, like, behind our own personal Jungian Great Walls. Then people would take my writing seriously like they do with Marni and Tess and that guy who wrote the Great Gatsby.”

“For above all, love is a sharing. Love is a power. Love is a change that takes place in our own heart. Sometimes it may change others, but always it changes us.”