Oh no,” I said, because if our life is just one endless song about hope and regret, then “oh no” is apparently that song’s chorus, the words we always return to.

When he did that, I didn’t hate him anymore, I really didn’t, and maybe this is why people do so many hateful things to the people that who love them: because it’s so easy to stop hating someone if you’ve already started loving them.

Sometimes you have to tell the truth about some of the stuff you’ve done so that people will believe you when you tell them the truth about other stuff you haven’t done.

There is something underwhelming about scholarly hate mail – the sad literary allusions, the refusal to use contractions – and so I didn’t pay much attention to those letters at all.

I didn’t normally talk this way: but sometimes you have to pretend to be an innocent child to learn something about the complicated world of adults.

If only my mother had a book to hold, she wouldn’t have looked so lonely. And maybe this was another reason why people read: not so they would feel less lonely, but so that other people would think they looked less lonely with a book in their hands and therefore not pity them and leave them alone.

When I was a boy, I would read those postcards and know exactly why my father was doing what he was doing: he was taking a stab at greatness, that is, if greatness is simply another word for doing something different from what you were already doing – or maybe greatness is the thing we want to have so that other people will want to have us, or maybe greatness is merely the grail for our unhappy, striving selves, the thing we think we need but don’t and can’t get anyway.

Because this is one of the things I learned on my own: you need to say things simply, especially when they’re complicated.

That’s not important,′ he said, and when Detective Wilson said that, I was sure he didn’t know the answer, ‘not important’ being just one of the things we call that which we don’t know.

Because this is one of the things I learned from Exley: anything can be a beginning as long as you call it one.