You aren’t the same person after a good night’s sleep as you are after a sleepless night. But which person is you?

Everything has to be paid for, especially money.

I annotated my friend’s book manuscript with scribbles on every page. She annotated mine with a single note: This needs to be better. She trusted that I would know what to do, and I did.

It can be worth forgoing marriage for sex, and it can be worth forgoing sex for marriage. It can be worth forgoing parenthood for work, and it can be worth forgoing work for parenthood. Every case is orthogonal to all the others. That’s the entire problem.

Is it a failure of my imagination that I’ve never been able to summon any genuine feeling about a sports team?

There are two kinds of people: those who can’t perform the act when they’re sad and those who perform it only to escape sadness. I have a theory that the second kind of person lives longer.

Every success story can be told as a series of failures.

Think of this as a short book composed entirely of what I hoped would be a long book’s quotable passages.

The first beautiful songs you hear tend to stay beautiful because better than beauty, which is everywhere, is the memory of first discovering beauty.