“The following afternoon, alone in their room, and oppressed by not yet having made the promised call to Connie...”

“Chipper intuited that this feeling of futility would be a fixture in his life. A dull waiting and then a broken promise, a panicked realization of how late it was.This futility had let's call it a flavor.”

“But the first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone.”

“The first thing that reading teaches us is how to be alone.”

“Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.”

“What made drugs perpetually so sexy was the opportunity to be other. Years after he'd figured out that pot only made him paranoid and sleepless, he still got hard-ons at the thought of smoking it. Still lusted for that jailbreak.”

“The pain was quite extraordinary. And yet also weirdly welcome and restorative, bringing him news of his aliveness and his caughtness in a story larger than himself.”