“He was a generous but subtly demanding boss.”

“Time after time during the next six months, he would put me together again.”

“A live-in domestic worker: "You are never sure that your soul is your own except when you are out of the house.”

“He was trying to find his footing in a world both familiar and foreign”

“A young mark twain on the make: "I can't turn in inkstand into Aladdin's lamp.”

“Abilene possessed greater vision, perhaps because it possessed little else.”

“Sometimes, insatiable curiosity and compassion are all that life requires of us.”

“Curiosity is the one thing invincible in Nature.”

“If spectacle is lacking in everyday life, it may be because we have forgotten where and how to look.”

“In his history of solitude, Anthony Storr writes about the importance of being able to feel at peace in one's own company. But many find that, trained by the Net, they cannot find solitude even at ...”

“A woman in her late sixties described her new iPhone: "it's like having a little time square in my pocketbook. All lights. All the people I could meet.”

“... and Lynn is dead inside, like a corpse. She Instagrams methodically, clinically, as if she's gathering evidence for defense, like her entire life is dedicated to proving that she has a life.”

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”