What You Discovered About Yourself In Raising

The More You Pursue Distractions, The Less Effective Any Particular Distraction Is, And So I'd Had To Up Various Dosages, Until, Before I Knew It, I Was Checking My E-mail Every Ten Minutes, And My Plugs Of Tobacco Were Getting Ever Larger, And My Two Drinks A Night Had Worsened To Four, And I'd Achieved Such Deep Mastery Of Computer Solitaire That My Goal Was No Longer To Win A Game But To Win Two Or More Games In A Row--a Kind Of Meta-solitaire Whose Fascination Consisted Not In Playing The Cards But In Surfing The Streaks Of Wins And Losses.

The Personality Susceptible To The Dream Of Limitless Freedom Is A Personality Also Prone, Should The Dream Ever Sour, To Misanthropy And Rage.

Brooklyn Was Like Philadelphia Made Better By Its Proximity To Manhattan.

But She Was Seventeen Now And Not Actually Dumb. She Knew That You Could Love Somebody More Than Anything And Still Not Love The Person All That Much, If You Were Busy With Other Things.

Expecting A Novel To Bear The Weight Of Our Whole Disturbed Society—to Help Solve Our Contemporary Problems—seems To Me A Peculiarly American Delusion. To Write Sentences Of Such Authenticity That Refuge Can Be Taken In Them: Isn't This Enough? Isn't It A Lot?