"People say I talk slowly. I talk in a way sometimes called laconic. The phone rings, I answer, and people ask if they've woken me up. I lose my way in the middle of sentences, leaving people hanging for minutes. I have no control over it. I'll be talking, and will be interested in what I'm saying, but then someone-I'm convinced this what happens-someone-and I wish I knew who, because I would have words for this person-for a short time, borrows my head. Like a battery is borrowed from a calculator to power a remote control, someone, always, is borrowing my head."

"Thank you,' he says.'Thank who?''I don't know."

"It was called the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages. If not for the monks, everything the world had ever learned would have been lost. Well, we live in a similar time, when we're losing the vast majority of what we do and see and learn. But it doesn't have to be that way."

"The raising of a child is the building of a cathedral. You can't cut corners."

"Hand, nobody told me about the weight. Why didn't our parents tell us about the weight?-What weight?-The fucking weight, Hand. How does the woman Ingres live? The one from Marrakesh? If we're vessels, and we are, then we, you and I, are overfull, and that means she's at the bottom of a deep cold lake. How can she stand the hissing of all that water?-We are not vessels; we are missiles.-We're static and we're empty. We are overfull and leaden.-We are airtight and we are missiles and all-powerful."

"Did children want sports cars for parents? No. They wanted Hondas. They wanted to know that the car would start in all seasons."

"This democracy thing, or Demoxie, whatever it is, good god. Under the guise of having every voice heard, you create mob rule, a filterless society where secrets are crimes."

"The key thing is, even if you only have a couple of hours a month, those two hours shoulder-to-shoulder, next to one student, concentrated attention, shining this beam of light on their work, on their thoughts and their self-expression, is going to be absolutely transformative, because so many of the students have not had that ever before."

"They took my mother's stomach out six months ago."

"Why shouldn't your curiosity about the world be rewarded?"

"He was warm, partly because he had on many layers, and partly because boys whoa re part wolf and part wind do not get cold."

"We would oppose the turning of the planet and refuse the setting of the sun."

"Here though, there are no oppressors. No one's forcing you to do this. You willingly tie yourself to these leashes. And you willingly become utterly socially autistic. You no longer pick up on basic human communication clues. You're at a table with three humans, all of whom are looking at you and trying to talk to you, and you're staring at a screen! Searching for strangers in... Dubai!"

"This was a new skill she'd acquired, the ability to look, to the outside world, utterly serene and even cheerful, while, in her skull, all was chaos."

"And that's actually the brunt of what we do is, people going straight from their workplace, straight from home, straight into the classroom and working directly with the students. So then we're able to work with thousands and thousands more students."

"You see pictures of Buddha and he's sitting, reclining, at peace. The Hindus have their twelve-armed elephant god, who also seems so content but not powerless. But leave it to Christians to have a dead and bloody man nailed to a cross."

"He must trust, and he must have faith. And so he builds, because what is building, and rebuilding and rebuilding again, but an act of faith?"

"Who were these people, all of them young couples, a few fabulous ones, tall thin-haired blondes with toned men in perfectly pressed jeans -- neither fearing the loss of the other."

"No. There is no balance, and no retribution, and no rules. The rules and balances you blather about are hopeful creations of a man fearing death."

"Here I am Rock You Like a Hurricane."

"Everyone in the life before was cranky, I think, because they just wanted to know.--After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned."

"Dignity is an affectation, cute but eccentric, like learning French or collecting scarves."

"My mind, I know, I can prove, hovers on hummingbird wings. It hovers and it churns. And when it's operating at full thrust, the churning does not stop. The machines do not rest, the systems rarely cool. And while I can forget anything of any importance--this is why people tell me secrets--my mind has an uncanny knack for organization when it comes to pain. Nothing tormenting is ever lost, never even diminished in color or intensity or quality of sound."

"The issue is complex, but like many matters in Sudan, it is not as complex as Khartoum would want the west to believe."

"That's what's new. There used to be the option of opting out. But now that's over. Completion is the end. We're closing the circle around everyone-it's a totalitarian nightmare."

"If things continue this way, there will be two societies - or at least I hope there will be two - the one you're helping create, and an alternative to it. You and your ilk will live, willingly, joyfully, under constant surveillance, watching each other always, commenting on each other, voting and liking and disliking each other, smiling and frowning, and otherwise doing nothing much else."

"But everyone disappears, no matter who loves them."

"Max had to think about these new developments. He hadn't liked getting hit by a rock--his stomach still ached from then rock Judith had thrown--but then again, when his team had used rocks on Alexander, it had caused him to surrender. Now the Bad Guys only had three soldiers left, which would make victory for Max's team more likely. So now it made perfect sense. He was wrong to ban rocks, or even animals. The key was to use all the weapons at one's disposal, but to just make sure you won when you used them."

"I mean, all this stuff you're involved in, it's all gossip. It's people talking about each other behind their backs. That's the vast majority of this social media, all these reviews, all these comments. Your tools have elevated gossip, hearsay and conjecture to the level of valid, mainstream communication. And besides that, it's fucking dorky."

"Now, you and I both know that if you can control the flow of information, you can control everything."

"Director of Ensuring the Future."

"Who says we don't want to be inspired? We fucking want to be inspired! What the fuck is wrong with us wanting to be inspired? Everyone acts like it's some crazy idea, some outrageous ungrantable request. Don't we deserve grand human projects that give us meaning?"

"We are unusual and tragic and alive."

"I wondered quickly if I'd give my life so that a dragon could live. If someone offered me that deal, your life for the existence of dragons.I thought maybe yes, maybe no."

"You will die, and when you die, you will know a profound lack of it [dignity]. It's never dignified, always brutal. What's dignified about dying? It's never dignified. And in obscurity? Offensive. Dignity is an affectation, cute but eccentric, like learning French or collecting scarves. And it's fleeting and incredibly mercurial. And subjective. So fuck it."

"The idea we came up with, well before we left, was something we coined Performance Literature. Excuse the use of that second word, because I realize it's presumptuous. Also, excuse the first word, and the term in general."

"All we really want is for no one to have a boring life, to be impressive, so we can be impressed. ~ on the friends we choose."

"Your memory has always been given to opportunistic revision."

"It is very much, she thinks, like looking at the moon and knowing one could make it there, too. It is only time and breath that stand between her and the top. She is young. She'll do it and have done it."

"It was a broken world, I knew then, that would allow a boy such as me to bury a boy such as William K."

"It was just an idea I had, that it could be cool to have a book covered in fake fur."

"So this is the space during tutoring hours. It's very busy. Same principles: one-on-one attention, complete devotion to the students' work and a boundless optimism and sort of a possibility of creativity and ideas."

"This morning there s first a predictable story about Darfur; an expert on African affairs notes that seven thousand African Union troops patrolling a region the size of France have been ineffectual in preventing continued janjaweed terror. Funding for the troops is about to run out, and it seems that no one, including the United States, is ready to put forth more money or come up with new ideas to stop the killing and displacement. This is not surprising to those of us who lived through twenty years of oppression by the hands of Khartoum and its militias."

"The country he had left thirty years ago had been a realistic place. There were political realities there, then and now, that precluded blind faith, that discouraged one from thinking that everything, always, would work out fairly and equitably. But he had come to believe such things in the United States. Things had worked out. Difficulties had been overcome. He had worked hard and achieved success. The machinery of government functioned."

"For a moment, she thought it natural in a way seeing a plane fall from the sky can seem natural, too. The horror comes later."

"Some of these kids just don't plain know how good they are: how smart and how much they have to say. You can tell them. You can shine that light on them, one human interaction at a time."

"It's not that our family has no taste, it's just that our family's taste is inconsistent."

"The men who are dropped in a jungle or a desert and expected video games and got mundanity and depravity and friends dying like animals."

"If you don't want anyone to know about your existence, you might as well kill yourself. You're taking up space, air."

"I was born into a town and a family and the town ad my family happened to me. I own none of it. It is everyone's. It is shareware. I like it, I like having been a part of it, I would kill or die to protect those who are part of it, but I don not claim exclusivity. Have it Take it from me. Do with is what you will. Make it useful. This is like making electricity from dirt; it is almost too good to be believed, that we can make beauty from this stuff."