“Then I dried myself in my soft bathrobe, shaved very carefully, put on fresh underwear and a shirt, a perfectly pressed gray suit, shiny shoes, my nicest tie and in this way, drawing on all the best things I had available, I started to feel the courage to move forward. It was a way of fooling myself, of course, but it worked : you can judge a book by its cover.”

“-and then what happened?- I asked him, but I had no desire to know. Whatever it was, it has to be ugly.”

“What you have to focus on here is perfection, pure and simple”

“indeed I know for a fact that you do know, what the fuck kind of questions are you asking me”

“I had ways of consoling myself. Yes, there was food but there was beyond food, this idea I had of an oversoul of loneliness. A connectedness among the world's lonely that I could turn to when I was very low. There was a delicious romance in being utterly alone, & I told myself I was nobler for it, & that there was a purpose to my solitude, O there must be.”

“Calm down. It amounts to nothing. Calm down. And that taxi driver was right, I wasn't supposed to park there, I was wrong. It was simply the wrong place, for me, too, for what I wanted to do, regardless of the prohibition: it was too whatever.”

“I really didn't realize the librarians were, you know, such a dangerous group.They are subversive. You think they're just sitting there at the desk, all quiet and everything. They're like plotting the revolution, man. I wouldn't mess with them. You know, they've had their budgets cut. They're paid nothing. Books are falling apart. The libraries are just like the ass end of everything, right?”