“Corporations [gained] direct access to what we may think of as our humanity, emotions, and agency but, in this context, are really just buttons.”

“If we could stop thinking of 'meaning' and 'purpose' as artifacts of some divine creative act and see them instead as the yield of our own creative future, they become goals, intentions and process...”

“Computers don't kill books people do.”

“Books have souls. Or so romantics like me tend to think.”

“The function of a book is to provide a reading experience.”

“Fantasy sports went a long way toward developing the sabermetrics formulas used not only by oddsmakers but general managers in hiring players. So the amateur fantasists ended up creating some of th...”

“Romance is the deepest thing in life. It is deeper than reality.”

“when you're a kid, they tell you that it's what's on the inside that counts. Looks don't matter . But that's not true. Guys like Phoebus in The Hunchback, or Dorian, or the old Kyle Kingsbury-- the...”

“Every concept of reality is all in our head, belief is what makes truth.”

“They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked high...”

“The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.”

“If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and...”

“I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it's the effect or vice versa”

“At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.”

“I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.”