“Words like anchors, tethering boats of memory that would otherwise be settled by the storm.”

“I won't put my ignorance on an altar and call it God. It feels like idolatry, like the worst kind of idolatry.”

“...slept too long. And I don’t much like the world I woke up to.”

“We contrast the urban and the natural, but that’s a contemporary myth. We’re animals, after all; our cities are organic products, fully as “natural” (whatever that word really means) as a termite hill or a rabbit warren. But how much more interesting: how much more complex, dressed in the intricacies and exfoliations of human culture, simple patterns iterated into infinite variation. And full of secrets, beyond counting.”

“Children wear their natures like brightly-colored clothes; that's why they lie so transparently. Adulthood is the art of deceit.”

“The conversation was mesmerizing, not for its content but for the cadences of the talk, the rhythm we fell into when we were alone, now as before. Every conversation between friends or lovers creates its own easy or awkward rhythms, hidden talk that runs like a subterranean river under even the most banal exchange.”

“But the world is what it is and won’t be bargained with.”