"Their talk was endless, compulsive, and indulgent, sometimes sounding like the remains of the English language after having been hashed over by nuclear war survivors for a few hundred years."

"People listening to songs are like people reading novels: for a few minutes, for a few hours, someone else gets to come in and hijack that part of your brain that's always thinking. A good book or song kidnaps your interior voice and does all the driving. With the artist in charge you're free for a little while to leave your body and be someone else."

"In Canada, when we speak of water, we're speaking of ourselves. Canadians are known to be unextravagant, and one explanation of this might be that we know that wasted water means a diminished collective soul; polluted waters mean a sickened soul. Water is the basis of our self-identity, and when we dream of canoes and thunderstorms and streams and even snowballs, we're dreaming about our innermost selves."

"The sixties are like a theme park to them. They wear the costume, buy their tickets, and they have the experience."

"The only way to the top is killing and greed. Okay, I'm kidding. But killing helps."

"Everybody has basically the same family, it's just reconfigured slightly differently from one to the next."

"Where does personality end and brain damage begin?"

"Brain research tells us that only twenty percent of human beings have a sense of irony, which means that eighty percent of the world takes everything at face value."

"I find it hard to believe that human beings are the crowning achievement of life on earth. Something better than us has to come along."

"There's a lot to be said for having a small manageable dream."

"So I got to thinking that perhaps that's what money is: a crystallization-or, rather, a homogenization-of time and free will into those things we call dollars and pounds and yen and euros. Money multiplies your time. It also expands your agency and broadens the number of things you can do accordingly. Big-time lottery winners haven't won ten million dollars-they've won ten thousand person-years of time to do pretty much anything they want anywhere on Earth. Windfalls are like the crystal meth version of time and free will."

"Anti-sabbatical: A job taken with the sole intention of staying only for a limited period of time (often one year). The intention is usually to raise enough funds to partake in another, more personally meaningful activity such as watercolor sketching in Crete or designing computer knit sweaters in Hong Kong. Employers are rarely informed of intentions."

"Personality is a slot machine, and the cherries, lemons, and bells are your SSRI system, your schizophrenic tendency, your left/right brain lobalization, your anxiety proclivity, your wiring glitches, your place on the autistic and OCD spectrums - and to these we must add the deep-level influences of the machines and systems of intelligence that guided your brain into maturity."

"This was not a good idea coming home for Christmas. I'm too old. Years ago, coming back from schools or trips, I always expected some sort of new perspective or fresh insight about the family on returning. That doesn't happen anymore-the days of revelation about my parents, at least, are over... its time to move on. I think we'd all appreciate that."

"Lottery tickets are a surtax on desperation."

"Aliens didn't come down to Earth and give us technology. We invented it ourselves. Therefore it can never be alienating it can only be an expression of our humanity."

"I was at Emily Carr College of Art and Design in Vancouver for four years, and I loved it."

"Long lives aren't natural. We forget that senior citizens are as much an invention as toasters or penicillin."

"I hate math. It's hard, it's stupid, and it's nature's way of separating spinsters from women who end up breeding."

"What if God exists except it turns out he doesn't really like people very much?"

"Chronotropic Drugs:Drugs engineered to affect one's sense of time. Chronodecelocotropic drugs have no short term effect but over time give one the impression that time feels longer. Chronoaccelocotropic drugs have the opposite effect."

"Anyway, it's a good thing we're human. We design business spreadsheets, paint programs, and word processing equipment. So that tells you where we're at as a species. What is the search for the next great compelling application but a search for the human identity?"

"Try not thinking of peeling an orange. Try not imagining the juice running down your fingers, the soft inner part of the peel. The smell. Try and you can't. The brain doesn't process negatives."

"Telling people they look relaxed makes them look relaxed."

"People are pretty forgiving when it comes to other people's families. The only family that ever horrifies you is your own."

"One of my own stray childhood fears had been to wonder what a whale might feel like had it been born and bred in captivity, then released into the wild-into its ancestral sea-its limited world instantly blowing up when cast into the unknowable depths, seeing strange fish and tasting new waters, not even having a concept of depth, not knowing the language of any whale pods it might meet. It was my fear of a world that would expand suddenly, violently, and without rules or laws: bubbles and seaweed and storms and frightening volumes of dark blue that never end."

"A bland smile is like a green light at an intersection, it feels good when you get one, but you forget it the moment you're past it."

"The future and eternity are two entirely different things."

"When you think about Twitter and you think what a dumb stupid throwaway technology, and then you have the Iranian elections and it actually saves the day - you can't prejudge technologies now because they have effects you may not have intended."

"Too much free time is certainly a monkey's paw in disguise. Most people can't handle a structureless life."

"Your body isn't just a body. It's an ecosystem."

"I've had maybe 20 jobs, big and small, and I've never hated any of them. At the same time, the moment the learning curve flattened, I was out of there."

"When future archaeologists dig up the remains of California, they're going to find all of those gyms their scary-looking gym equipment, and they're going to assume that we were a culture obsessed with torture."

"When someone tells you they've just bought a house, they might as well tell you they no longer have a personality. You can immediately assume so many things: that they're locked into jobs they hate; that they're broke; that they spend every night watching videos; that they're fifteen pounds overweight; that they no longer listen to new ideas. It's profoundly depressing."

"People don't have dominion over Nature. it's gone beyond that. Human beings and the world are now the same thing. The future and whatever happens to you after you die - it's all melted together. Death isn't the escape hatch the way it used to be."

"People who advocate simplicity have money in the bank; the money came first, not the simplicity."

"If nothing else, we simply get used to being alive."

"Nothing very very good and nothing very very bad ever lasts for very very long."

"Wow. Whoops. Sorry. ... I just lost two hours inside a YouTube kitten warp."

"It is indeed a mistake to confuse children with angels."

"We need to be around our families not because we have so many shared experiences to talk about, but instead because they know precisely which subjects to avoid."

"We are all of us born with a letter inside us, and that only if we are true to ourselves, may we be allowed to read it before we die."

"Life always kills you in the end, but first it prevents you from getting what you want."

"You spend a much larger part of your life being old, not young."

"Remember travel agents? Remember how they just kind of vanished one day? Well, that's where all the other jobs that once made us middle class are going, to that same magical, class-killing, job-sucking wormhole into which travel agency jobs vanished, never to return."

"On TV people look at your hair and then they look at your skin, and then they look at your clothes, and by the time they're listening to what you're saying, you're off the screen."

"And once again, work is providing us with a comforting sense of normalcy-living and working inside of coding's predictably segmented time/space. Simply grinding away at something makes life feel stable, even though the external particulars of life (like our pay checks, our office, and so forth) are, at best, random."

"I think that emotions affect you as much as x-rays and vitamins and car crashes."

"The capacity for not feeling lonely can carry a very real price, that of feeling nothing at all."

"Americans are a quarter of a billion people who have almost nothing in common except for the fact they've been told they have lots in common."