“I find that anything culturally significant that happened before '93 I associate with the decade before it. In fact, Oregon Trail is one of a handful of signposts that middle school existed at all.”

“All my best writing was written before 1982, and then a significant event happened to me: I was born.”

“..I met two young guys from the Oregon National Guard... The lieutenant told me about their temporary barracks in an old neighborhood high school. He told me that he was disgusted that kids ever went to school there, and that in Oregon the place would have been bulldozed and rebuilt so that kids could have a proper place to learn. He seemed troubled that all of this was happening in America. He realized that many of the problems he was seeing in New Orleans existed before the storm, and he wanted to know why people had put up with it and why they hadn't voted out of office the people who had let this happen. I told him I didn't know, but maybe we could change things in New Orleans in the future. He seemed hopeful. I felt less certain.”

“Who knows what we all are before anything happens?”

“Bird, don't sound so crushed. The fact that I had never had sex before can only have been significant for me, if it had any meaning at all-it had nothing to do with you.”

“The next minute he realized what had happened to him, but not before she’d caught him staring.For a decade, I was fixated by her beauty. I wrote an entire article on the evolutionary significance of beauty as a rebuke to myself, that I, who understood the concepts so well, nevertheless could not escape the magnetic pull of one particular woman’s beauty.She knew. With surgical precision, she had peeled back his layers of defenses, until his heart lay bare before her, all its shame and yearning exposed.He could have lived with this if only he’d kept his secret whole and buried. But she knew. She knew.”