She was terrified of everything, and terrified to show it.

Be on guard. The road widens, and many of the detours are seductive.

It's weird to feel like you miss someone you're not even sure you know.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.

[T]o really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help.

A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane.