The Candy House: A Novel

But knowing everything is too much like knowing nothing; without a story, it’s all just information.

Anyway, my point is that quantification, per se, doesn’t ruin baseball. In fact, it deepens our understanding of it. So why are we so averse to letting ourselves be quantified?”

One horror of motherhood lies in the moments when she can see both the exquisiteness of her child and his utter inconsequence to others.

But where the eluders have it wrong is that quantifiability doesn’t make human life any less remarkable, or even (this is counterintuitive, I know) less mysterious—any more than identifying the rhyme scheme in a poem devalues the poem itself. The opposite! Mysteries that are destroyed by measurement were never truly mysterious; only our ignorance m

And yet these many irreconcilable worlds occupy one physical space—like the D&D maps stacked inside a single envelope. How is it possible? Philosophy!

In the new heroism, the goal is to dig beneath your shiny persona. You’ll be surprised by what lies underneath: a rich, deep crawl space of possibility.

a symbiosis that made her old life obsolete, had been temporary.

If she’d had an inkling, back then, of the ache this constraint would cause her, she would never—not once!—have said, “Let go of me, boys, I just need a minute,” and shaken them off. She would have held still and let them pick her clean, understanding that there would be nothing better to save herself for.

The defector is a typical—likely an impressionist—beguiled by a fantasy of freedom and escape. It is a state of mind I can grasp only theoretically. There is nothing original about human behavior.