“I have no idea,' he said, and that's another thing I'll put in my arsonist's guide: be wary of a man who says, 'I have no idea,' when asked why his wife doesn't like something he's done, which of c...”

“Because this is another thing your average American man in crisis does: he tries to go home, forgetting, momentarily, that he is the reason he left home in the first place, that the home is not his...”

“After a dream like that, you're grateful that it was just a dream, that no matter how bad your actual life, it couldn't be worse than your dream life. ”

“Oh no," I said, because if our life is just one endless song about hope and regret, then "oh no" is apparently that song's chorus, the words we always return to.”

“When I was a boy, I would read those postcards and know exactly why my father was doing what he was doing: he was taking a stab at greatness, that is, if greatness is simply another word for doing ...”

“This helping-people business was an attractive idea, I'll admit, because up to now I'd not done much more than be, and when I wasn't just being, I'd caused some pain, too.”

“This last night we tear into each other, as if to wound, as if to find the key to everything before morning.”

“Dissociation of the mind into logic-tight compartments is by no means confined to the population of the asylum. It is a common, and perhaps inevitable, occurrence in the psychology of every human b...”

“To observe life as an inevitability and to observe the nuanced stratification of life are two completely different points of view on life.”