I am, as you know, a bottomless pit of ambition and need. But I also want to make something sweet. Something kids like us would have wanted to play to forget their troubles for a while.” Sadie was moved by Sam’s words—in the years she had known him, he so rarely mentioned his own pain.

There are, he determines, infinite ways his mother doesn’t die that night and only one way she does.

greatness for Sam and Sadie meant different things. To oversimplify: For Sam, greatness meant popular. For Sadie, art.

As far as Sadie knew, Marx was a good-looking rich kid with a wide range of interests and very few skills. At Crossroads, where she’d gone to high school, half of her male classmates had been Marxes.

I am, as you know, a bottomless pit of ambition and need.

How do I go on when the person I love most in the world is in love with someone else? Someone tell me the solution, he thought, so I don’t have to play this losing game all the way through.

We had so much freedom—creatively, technically. No one was watching us, and we weren’t even watching ourselves. What we had was our impossibly high standards, and your completely theoretical conviction that we could make a great game.”

to be half of two things is to be whole of nothing.

the human brain is every bit as closed a system as a Mac.