“I am willing to be annoying if that's what was necessary.”

“They reciprocated the great and saving lie--that our love for things is greater than our lover for our love for things--willfully playing the parts they wrote for themselves, willfully creating and believing fictions necessary for life.”

“But when, at the end of my sophomore year, I became a philosophy major and started doing my first seriously pretentious thinking, I became a vegetarian again. The kind of willful forgetting that I was sure meat eating required felt too paradoxical to the intellectual life I was trying to shape. I thought life could, should, and must conform to the mold of reason. You can imagine how annoying this made me.”

“Even if I don't like what I am, I know what I am. My children like what they are, but they don't know what they are. So tell me which is worse.”

“I am doing something I hate for you. This is what it means to be in love.”

“We are lying to ourselves and to each other.Lying about what? I don't care if we're lying.I am a bad person.I don't care. I don't care what you are.”

“As long as I am thinking, I am alive.”