“We had put almost all of our possessions in storage, which was a metaphor for being twenty, as were so many things.”

“It does not follow, because our ancestors made so many errors of fact and mixed them with their religion, that we should therefore leave off being religious at all. By being religious we establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality at the only points at which reality is given us to guard. Our responsible concern is with our private destiny, after all.”

“If life — the craving for which is the very essence of our being — were possessed of any positive intrinsic value, there would be no such thing as boredom at all: mere existence would satisfy us in itself, and we should want for nothing.”

“Were they beautiful? We were all beautiful. We were in our twenties.”

“There are so many people we could become, and we leave such a trail of bodies through our teens and twenties that it's hard to tell which one is us. How many versions do we abandon over the years?”

“Obsessing about things isn’t good for you. It’s a form of possessing things and at some level of awareness; we possess nothing. That’s how we get free of being possessed by our possessions.”