"What exactly is it that humans do that is specifically human? There has to be something. How odd it is for billions of people to be alive, yet not one of them is really quite sure of what makes people people."

"I think the killers get far too much attention."

"It had been drilled into us that to feel fear is to not fully trust God. Whoever made that up has never been beneath a cafeteria table with a tiny thread of someone else's blood trickling onto their leg."

"Time ticks by; we grow older. Before we know it, too much time has passed and we've missed the chance to have had other people hurt us. To a younger me this sounded like luck; to an older me this sounds like a quiet tragedy."

"God is what keeps us together after the love is gone."

"Making eye contact with adults while dressed as a clown is risky."

"I have trouble with seafood because it tastes like a dock."

"If human beings had genuine courage, they'd wear their costumes every day of the year, not just on Halloween."

"Human beings are the only animal that thinks they change who they are simply by moving to a different place. Birds migrate, but it's not quite the same thing."

"And then I felt sad because I realized that once people are broken in certain ways, they can't ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one. You wonder when your turn is going to be, or if it's already happened."

"Chronocanine Envy:Sadness experienced when one realized that, unlike one's dog, one cannot live only in the present tense. As Kierkegaard said, "Life must be lived forward."

"At least there's nothing scary about him and hopefully he doesn't see anything scary in me. We go way back, to summer camp. We KNOW each other. People I don't know just make me want to say YIKES! I'll take history over mystery any day of the week."

"Every human being you see in the course of a day has a problem that's sucking up at least 70 percent of his or her radar."

"You know, I really think that when God puts together families, he sticks his finger into the white pages and selects a group of people at random and then says to them all, 'Hey! You're going to spend the next seventy years together, even though you have nothing in common and don't even like each other. And, should you not feel yourself caring about any of this group of strangers, even for a second, you will just feel dreadful."

"Hi! I'm Ethan, I shop at Ikea. I bought a $300 dining suite and it took me three days to assemble!"

"To have a healthy culture, you have to have stable health care financing and stable arts financing and stable sports financing, and if you don't have that, your culture becomes a parking lot."

"I want pills called September 10. You take one and your mind feels like the 11th never happened."

"As you grow older, it becomes harder to feel 100 percent happy; you learn all the things that can go wrong, you become superstitious about tempting fate, about bringing disaster upon your life by accidentally feeling too good one day."

"You wait for fate to bring about the changes in life which you should be bringing about by yourself."

"It was a December night so cold and clear that the air felt like the air of the Moon - lung-burning, mentholated and pure."

"Only losers make decisions when things are bad. The time to rejig your life is the time when it's seemingly smooth."

"You can't get mad at weather because weather's not about you. Apply that lesson to most other aspects of life."

"Your brain forms roughly 10,000 new cells every day, but unless they hook up to preexisting cells with strong memories, they die. Serves them right."

"Is that all time is - our perception of how quickly it does or does not pass?"

"Forget sex or politics or religion, loneliness is the subject that clears out a room."

"I think Americans are weirdly puritanistic about psychopharmaceuticals. There are millions of people out there who would otherwise be dead or rocking by themselves in a corner who now lead full and normal lives because of amazing and wonderful scientific advances."

"For many people, myself included, the end of the world is happening all the time! It is a form of criticality that paradoxically gives us hope for change and improvement."

"I think that every reader on earth has a list of cherished books as unique as their fingerprints....I think that, as you age, you tend to gravitate towards the classics, but those aren't the books that give you the same sort of hope for the world that a cherished book does."

"I think that in the future, clocks won't say three o'clock anymore. They'll just get right to the point and rename three o'clock 'Pepsi.'"

"To acknowledge God is to fully accept the sorrow of the human condition."

"She thought about her life and how lost she'd felt for most of it. She thought about the way that all truths she'd been taught to consider valuable invariably conflicted with the world as it was actually lived. How could a person be so utterly lost, yet remain living?"

"Canadians can easily 'pass for American' as long as we don't accidentally use metric measurements or apologize when hit by a car."

"Eagles are seagulls with a good hairdo."

"I don't deserve a soul, yet I still have one. I know because it hurts."

"Books turn people into isolated individuals, and once that's happened, the road only grows rockier. Books wire you to want to be Steve McQueen, but the world wants you to be SMcQ23667bot@hotmail.com."

"We decided that the French could never write user-friendly software because they're so rude."

"Rick feels almost the way he used to halfway through his third drink, his favorite moment, the way he wishes all moments in life could feel: heightened with the sense that anything could happen at any moment--that being alive is important, because just when you least expect it, you might receive exactly what you least expect."

"We're told by TV and Reader's Digest that a crisis will trigger massive personal change--and that those big changes will make the pain worthwhile. But from what he could see, big change almost never happens. People simply feel lost. They have no idea what to say or do or feel or think. they become messes and tend to remain messes."

"Most of us have only two or three genuinely interesting moments in our lives; the rest is filler."

"Sometimes it just feels really really wonderful to be alive."

"Salad bars are like a restaurant's lungs. They soak up the impurities and bacteria in the environment, leaving you with much cleaner air to enjoy."

"One of the cruelest things you can do to another person is pretend you care about them more than you really do."

"If you don't have a spiritual practice in place when times are good, you can't expect to suddenly develop one during a moment of crisis."

"People will always choose more money over more sex."

"Sometimes it feels as if everything in life is just something we haul into the grave."

"Men won't read any email from a woman that's over 200 words long."

"When you write, it's just a much more crystalline, compressed version of the voice you think with - though not the one you speak with. I think your writing voice is your laser-guided missile. It's the poetry part of you."

"I think if human beings had genuine courage, they'd wear their costumes every day of the year, not just on Halloween. Wouldn't life be more interesting that way? And now that I think about it, why the heck don't they? Who made the rule that everybody has to dress like sheep 364 days of the year? Think of all the people you'd meet if they were in costume every day. People would be so much easier to talk to - like talking to dogs."

"You know what the best thing is about the end of the day? Tomorrow, it starts all over again."

"Fate is for losers."