“I still haven't finished unpacking - by the time I do, it'll be time to move again.”

“Sometimes great tunes happen to bad times, and when the bad time is over, not all the tunes get to move on with you.”

“When I was a junior, my school introduced badminton, which was clearly a P.E. department ploy to get me away from the wrestling room, and it worked, since the first time I played badminton was like the first time I tasted sushi or heard the Beatles or read Wordsworth. This was a sport? This counted for gym requirements?”

“I get sentimental over the music of the ’90s. Deplorable, really. But I love it all. As far as I’m concerned the ’90s was the best era for music ever, even the stuff that I loathed at the time, even the stuff that gave me stomach cramps.”

“I don’t know what your type is. I don’t know what your deal is. I don’t even know if you have a boyfriend. I know I like you and I want to be in yourlife, that’s it, and if you have any room for a boyfriend, I would like to be your boyfriend, and if you don’t have any room, I would like to be your friend.Any room you have for me in your life is great. If you would like me to start out in one room and move to another, I could do that.”

“The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with — nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they can add up to the story of a life.”

“Before I met Maria, I was your basic craven hermit. I spent most of my time in my room, in love with my walls, hiding out from the world with myfanzines and my records. I thought I was happier that way. I had developed these monastic habits to protect myself from something, probably, butwhatever it was, the monastic habits had turned into the bigger problem. In my headphones, I led a life of romance and incident and intrigue, noneof which had anything to do with the world outside my Walkman. I was an English major, obsessed with Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater and AlgernonSwinburne, thrilling to the exploits of my decadent aesthete poet idols, even though my only experience with decadence was reading about it.”