“Her definition of romance was absentminded intimacy, the way someone else's hand stray to your plate of food.I replied: no, that's just friendship; romance is always knowing exactly where that some...”

“We never actually have serious conversations about anything for more than 20 seconds. So theres a beautiful superficiality to our relationship which sometimes gets covered up by all the genuine aff...”

“They adore you beacause they think you offer up your friendship and ask for nothing in return. But that's not true-' He took a deep breath. 'You do ask for something. You ask that we never expect y...”

“If we had more reliable systems of law and governance perhaps our friendship would be shallower.”

“I'll fall.''You wont fall.''I'll fall. I'll fall and I'll die.'As I said it, I could see it happening. The foot stepping on air, pulling the rest of my body with it, tree limbs breaking as I plumme...”

“Come on! Think of Miandad hitting that six off Sharma. If he could do that, you can do this.”

“Ellington Feint was a line in my mind running right down the middle of my life, separating the formal training of my childhood and the territory of the rest of my days. She was an axis, and at that...”

“Progress across the time axis is passive. Progress up the results axis is passion.”

“I still hear the world spinning.”

“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...”