Dating someone exclusively for four months in New York is like four years in Anchorage.

I’m just not ready to give myself up, Sammy. I mean, there’s something perfect about virginity, and I haven’t found someone who deserves to take that perfection from me…”“You’re loco, Carlos. Insane. Totally crazy… Most guys think they’re imperfect for still being virgins past the age of seventeen.

I kept returning to this new and bizarre question: is there anything that actually is as it seems? Is anything perceptually straightforward? Maybe that’s inherently impossible, because impressions are, by their very nature, cumulative – the sum of all your interactions with and perceptions of things.

Well, on some level, it’s similar to the psychological phenomenon of helplessness, where the will to try is lost. You get to the point where you just assume that your spontaneous call to a friend will go to voicemail or an assistant, and you decide not to bother.

Having had virtually no contact with the outside world for the last few weeks, Evan had temporarily forgotten the social norms governing shopping conduct or approaching celebrities in public.

Because in the end, we die. It’s like Chekhov observed in so many of his plays: ‘in two hundred years, no one will even know we were here.

So our narcissism has bared forth an unflattering nakedness that shames our species. But this is humanity. This is our condition.

Sometimes violence is necessary to prevent even more violence,” I concluded, almost as if it were an epiphany.