“Phillip is a repository of random snatches of film dialogue and song lyrics. To make room for all of it in his brain, he apparently cleared out all the areas where things like reason and common sense are stored.”

“Do I really look so pathetic to all of you? Like I couldn't possibly meet someone on my own? Half the people in the world are women. Odds are that at least a few of them would be willing to go out with me.' 'Damn right,' Phillip chimes in. 'And it's not like he's been celibate since he moved out. He had sex last night, FYI.' 'Don't help me, Phillip.”

“A problem is something to solve," Phillip says. "If there's no solutions, it's not a problem, so stop treating it like one.”

“Silver is forty-four years old, if you can believe it, out of shape, and depressed—although he doesn’t know if you call it depression when you have good reason to be; maybe then you’re simply sad, or lonely, or just painfully aware, on a daily basis, of all the things you can never get back.”

“Life, for the most part, inevitably becomes routine, the random confluence of timing and fortune that configures its components all but forgotten. But every so often, I catch a glimpse of my life out of the corner of my eye, and am rendered breathless by it.”

“Things have been a mess for so many years that trying to pin down a starting point is like trying to figure out where your skin starts.”

“Phillip is the Paul McCartney of our family: better-looking than the rest of us, always facing a different direction in pictures, and occasionally rumored to be dead.”