The mall’s overwhelmingness was meant to replace your imagination. Forget trying to dream up your desires; the mall had already dreamed them up for you.

Books. Sure. But mostly I build interest. Attention. Allure. A book is just packaging, just a container. This is what I’ve realized. The mistake people in the book business make is they think their job is to build good containers. Saying you’re in the book business is like a winemaker saying he’s in the bottle business. What we’re actually building is interest. A book is simply one shape that interest can take when we scale and leverage it.

Our bodies are the thin knife’s edge separating us from oblivion.

Because one thing she’s learned through all this is that if a new beginning is really new; it will feel like a crisis. Any real change should make you feel, at first, afraid;.

And I told you to bring nine toys, she said. you bought eight. Next time try to pay more attention. And the disappointment in her voice made him cry even harder, so hard that he couldn’t talk and thus he couldn’t tell her that he put eight toys in the wagon because the ninth toy was the wagon itself.

Sometimes what we avoid most is not pain but mystery.

What Faye won’t understand and may never understand is that there is not one true self hidden by many false ones. Rather, there is one true self hidden by many other true ones.

It’s no secret that most memoirs are really self-help books in disguise.

Listen, Samuel, really, voice of experience here? It’s a terrible burden, being idealistic. It discolors everything you’ll do later. It will haunt you constantly for all time as you become the inevitably cynical person the world requires you to be.

Every life has a moment like this, a trauma that breaks you into brand-new pieces.