“You can't rush excellence.”

“Friendship is a strange animal. It only thrives in voluntary enjoyment of each other's company, in the pleasure of nonobligatory connection. I repeat: You owe me nothing.”

“I scrambled to pack my things, glad I owned so little.”

“Thank God for my hobgoblin, small-minded consistency...”

“Let nothing human be foreign to me”

“My sudden, unforeseen capitulation had knocked me backward, and I had nothing to hold on to. My internal weather was eerily calm, as if in a tornado's aftermath, birdsong, sunshine, supersaturated colors, wreckage all around, and myself, dazed and limping.”

“It happened every single day in Brooklyn: awaken to fresh glory, fall asleep to blight and ruin.”