“[What a great way to describe how a city takes its unique "shape"...beautiful turn-of-phrase by Kieran Shields(!)]:"It was a city of slopes, curves, and dips carved by glaciers and now criss-crossed by a network of angled streets and blocks, unfettered by any sense of regularity and uniformity. Portland's maze of cobbled roads was the result of two and a half centuries of fisherman and merchants driven by immediate necessity and that economy of steps that occurs naturally in a place where winters often lasted five months out of the year.”

“Bookish people, who are often maladroit people, persist in thinking they can master any subtlety so long as it's been shaped into acceptable expository prose.”

“She cherished her spiritual books and doesn't deny the debt contracted from some of them. -- Kieran Kavanaugh regarding Teresa of Avila”

“A boy in my house was strange enough. But a guy who was that comfortable in someone else's house, around a parent? A boy who knew how to chop vegetables? A boy who voluntarily helped with everything? Was he one of those adults masqerading as a teenager! Was he a narc or something? Maybe there was a big drug problem at my school and twenty-five-year-old Robbie had been sent in to fix it.Except that he'd been around since kindergarten, so unless the cops planned way ahead, that was out of the question.”

“I laughed as we turned in a tight circle... "Tonight you're all mine."Jake smiled but looked me dead in the eye. "No. From now on."My heart skipped. "What?""Yours," he said simply, "from now on.”

“IT’S HARDLY a coincidence that “Shipping Out,” Wallace’s most well-known essay, appeared only a month before Infinite Jest, his most well-known novel, was published. Both are about the same thing (amusing ourselves to death), with different governing données (lethally entertaining movie, lethally pampering leisure cruise). In an interview after the novel came out, Wallace, asked what’s so great about writing, said that we’re existentially alone on the planet—I can’t know what you’re thinking and feeling, and you can’t know what I’m thinking and feeling—so writing, at its best, is a bridge constructed across the bridge of human loneliness.”

“As I walked inside, she turned around and headed for the end of the bed. Then she paused and turned to face me. She was wearing her Orchard Hill basketball T-shirt and sweatpants and she looked tired, but beautiful.”