The flip side of being a person who never fails at anything is that you never do anything you could fail at. You never do anything risky.

we’re so wrapped up in our own story that we don’t see how we’re supporting characters in someone else’s.

smelled the aggressive, claustrophobic odor of institutionalized medicine:

Every life has a moment like this, a trauma that breaks you into brand-new pieces.

Samuel thought how his father married to his mother was like a spoon married to a garbage disposal.

You wake up every morning intending to write but you don’t, ultimately, write. You can’t really say what exactly you spend your days doing, except that it is not writing.

Seeing ourselves clearly is the project of a lifetime.

The things you love the most will one day hurt you the worst.

It’s no secret that the great American pastime is no longer baseball. Now it’s sanctimony.”