“And I’d choose you; in a hundred lifetimes, in a hundred worlds, in any version of reality, I’d find you and I’d choose you.”

“The only man alive to see it, though, was a wealthy recluse and neurotic, so beset by the embarrassments of society that he had withdrawn from it entirely. For him, every conversation, every transaction, down to the briefest and most businesslike, had become yet another occasion for injury. Those countless social encounters, with their countless tiny cuts--cuts inflicted, cuts received, and the one just as painful to remember as the other. Those smiles preceded by telltale pauses. Those favors both sexual and financial. Those what-do-you-thinks and let-me-borrow-you-for-a-seconds. It had all been too much for him, too freighted with need and misunderstanding....”

“If your idea succeeds, everybody says you’re persistent. If it doesn’t succeed, you’re stubborn.”

“Everyone needs to have their own measure of what ‘winning’ means to them.”

“We suffer because we are the grass upon which giants tread.”

“Sometimes a book about other people’s problems is way better than your own.”

“That's how it works: someone important believes in us, loudly and with conviction and against all substantiation, and over time, we begin to believe, too - not in our shot at perfection, mind you, but in the good enough version of us that they have reflected.”

“If John Lennon was right that life is what happens when you're making other plans, parenthood is what happens when everything is flipped over and spilling everywhere and you can't find a towel or a sponge or your "inside" voice.”