Leo sought to tease out details but failed – Ott had the ability to insert full stops in conversations, when and where he wished them.

Nothing epitomizes the futility of human striving quite like aspartame.

What strikes me,” Sarah continued, “is that men are such savages – they don’t fold their clothes, they pee on the toilet seat, they barely wash – yet when it comes to their views on women they’re suddenly so concerned about how everything looks. Each barbarian becomes an aesthete about the female body, all of a sudden expecting perfection.

People did not see the world for what it was but for what they were.

Unlike in books, there was no concluding page on the Internet, just a limitless chain that left her tired, tense, up too late.

Books,” he said, “are like mushrooms. They grow when you are not looking. Books increase by rule of compound interest: one interest leads to another interest, and this compounds into third. Next, you have so much interest there is no space in closet.

What’s remarkable about fiction is that it places you in the unusual position of having no trajectory. You stand aside, motives abandoned for the duration. The characters have the trajectories now, while you just observe. And this stirs compassion that, in real life, is so often obscured by our own motives.

The purpose of clothing, as best he could tell, was to keep one unembarrassed and at the right temperature. If an outfit served that purpose for a respectable period – twenty years, say – and at the lowest price available, then it was successful.

When young, Pinch considered human connections the refuge of those who couldn’t make art. Or is art just the refuge of those who cannot connect?

You can’t dread what you can’t experience. The only death we experience is that of other people. That’s as bad as it gets. And that’s bad enough, surely.