1. “We exchanged one or two letters, but it was hard to have our conversations in that medium, since news and updates were not the real substance of our conversations” (10)
2. “I have always had a problem with the shoeshine business, and even on the rare occasions when I wished to have my scuffed shoes cleaned, some egalitarian spirit kept me from doing so; it felt ridiculous to mount the elevated chairs in the shops and have someone keel before me. It wasn’t, as I often said to myself, the kind of relationship I wanted to have with another person.” (71)
3. “Normally, I would have been curious about the person in the seat next to mine, a curiosity that was almost always disappointed. I would soon afterward find myself eager to get the small talk done with and, the absence of mutual interests firmly established, to return to the book I was reading.” (87)
4. “To be alive, it seemed to me, as I stood there in all kinds of sorrow, was to be both original and reflection, and to be dead was to be split off, to be reflection alone.” (192)
5. “It was a cause, and I was distrustful of causes, but it was also a choice, and I found my admiration for decisive choice increasing, because I was so essentially indecisive myself.” (198)
6. “Each person must, on some level, take himself as the calibration point for normalcy, must assume that the room of his own mind is not, cannot be, entirely opaque to him. Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories. In fact, it is quite the contrary: we play, and only play, the hero, and in the swirl of other people’s stories, insofar as those stories concern us at all, we are never less than heroic.” (243)
