“Nuclear didn't describe families. How could it? Dry physics was not equal to that task. In the twentieth century we needed a biological metaphor, Darwinian in scope, to suggest the gnash and crash of carnivorous life in the family gene pool. But for the 21st century, the new century, I think the metaphors must be chemical. Molecular. In the molecular family people are connected without being bound. They spindle themselves around shared experiences and affections rather than splashing in the shared gene pool.”

“I'm a 21st-century kid trapped in a 19th-century family.”

“There are no real Californians. There are only people who live there and people who don't.”

“She spoke with the usual cadences of the young: sentences curling upward at the end, all statements fading into a smoky, implied question mark, as though nothing could be said with any reasonable certainty.”

“When you bite into a chocolate truffle, you don't want to find oat bran.”

“Judaism teaches us the sentence, “The Lord is One,” is not exclusive to Adonai, but rather inclusive of everything, everything, everything! Did you get that? Everything is One. This means far more than the teaching we are all connected. That teaching could be speaking biologically, or even atomically. I am talking about more than even the microscopic connection we all share. More than our DNA.”

“Me? I'm the king of the twentieth century. I'm the bogeyman. The villain...The black sheep of the family.”