Halley believed that a kiss was the beginning of a story, the story, good or bad, short or long, of an us, and once begun, you had to follow it through to the end.

I do not think my life would make a very interesting book,′ I say. ‘I feel I can speak with a certain amount of authority here.

And even though it didn’t work, it did sort of work, because when we’re all together, it’s like Skippy’s there too, because each of us has his own little jigsaw piece of him he remembers, and when you fit them all together, and you make the whole picture, then it’s like he comes to life.

This is the way they live now, like two actors in the final performances of a show no one comes to see anymore.

People don’t want the truth,′ he says, waving a hand at the streets around us. ‘They want better-quality lies. High definition lies on fifty-inch screens.

It used to be the smartest people didn’t always want to be the richest people.

It’s like when you find out your lover has been unfaithful: in one horrible instant everything she was to you, the whole beautiful enchantment, falls away, and you see her as she really is – mortal, machinating, tethered like everyone else to a little patch of space and time. And the worst of it is that you knew all along.

The importance of humor is primarily to puncture fixed ideas – to make us step back and realize that our situation, whatever it may be, is, in the grand scheme of things, always contingent and arbitrary and ephemeral. And that helps us to deal with our emotions and to keep going. Holding on to one perspective, on the other hand, whether it takes the form of grief or anger or a particular political standpoint, is often destructive to us and to those around us.

Prayer – Christian prayer – by its very nature is born out of an acknowledgment of need, out of an honest recognition of spiritual poverty.

If it’s a choice between a difficult truth and a simple lie, people will take the lie every time. Even if it kills them.