Why am I so suspicious of the newfound happiness or self-knowledge of this person about whom I claim to care? Am I truly committed to this person’s well-being, or do I miss the comfort of feeling unshakably superior? These are uncomfortable questions to ask yourself, so you might consider asking the machine instead.

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You already know what the machine will write on your arm That lie you’ve been telling yourself – you know what it is. That blind spot is not really a blind spot – you’re choosing to look away. Perhaps more to the point, you already know whether you want to see it. You already know whether you’re going to use the machine. So why are you still reading this?

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At the very least I would have recognized his persistent flattery as a shutting-down of my curiosity no less violent than the slap. But I wanted his praise more than I wanted the truth.

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I was one of those smart children who wishes he were much smarter, and so compensates with a smug attitude toward other children and a toadying one toward adults. Honestly, I was probably bullied less than I deserved.

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My father did the best he could, which as a description of human behavior sounds like a tautology but is actually true of very few people.

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but are as wise and full of feeling as any of the three of us, might realize that it’s in human nature to be self-deceiving, to not see important things in our own lives, and so seek external guidance to correct that?

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one day face a choice between what they wanted and what they were permitted to want

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Though she rebuffed the men who made insinuations to her – the words “for worse” had been included for a reason in the promise she had made to God – she nonetheless found these insinuations agreeable.

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life was waiting for life to be over.

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This made me even madder, and also more in love with Leah, since she had now outmatched me in the two things at which every teenager wants to excel: caring and not caring.

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You have to learn who you are before it’s too late. The big mistakes people keep making life – the pattern is so obvious to everyone except the people themselves.

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On Friday nights, people either distract themselves from the serious questions about their lives, or they decide not to distract themselves.

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How much is an increase in happiness worth?

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Your grandmother is dead.

What? But I just left a few hours ago.

Right. When you leave someone who’s about to die that person might be dead by the time you come back. That’s the way it works.

But I thought I’d have more time.

I have no trouble believing that you thought that.

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That’s important and nobody wants to talk about what’s important. The only way to get people to talk about something important is to leave them with no other option.

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I was, if anything, even more sympathetic than the average teenager to any argument against selling out, and to the argument that there was no difference between selling and selling out.

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I tried to think, one of my favorite ways of not thinking.

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When you summarize what people say back to them, they often tell you that you’re very smart.

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Thinking, like any drug, can be a useful distraction from pain, as long as it’s carefully managed and does not become an addiction.

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One need not be at one’s best to do one’s best work.

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It’s impossible to know at what point you decided to something, tough that rarely stops us from constructing stories about when we decided to do something.

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he commenced doing what fathers are supposed to do: state facts in a way that makes their children hate the facts, their fathers, and themselves.

“I see the birthday girl has brought a young man.”

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glad to be finished with what I had thought would be a lengthy game in which I’d have to pretend to be pretending not to be interested in him

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didactic stretches about things like perfume ads and action-movie sequels, things so obviously terrible they were more interesting to defend than to attack.

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it’s difficult not to open a door when you have the key

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I thought that the book sounded extremely stupid, and I hated myself for not having written it. I read every blog post and review I could find about it. In most cases, I read the negative ones two or three times. Then I read the book and I thought it was excellent. I reread the negative review to convince myself that I was wrong. I reminded myself that I wasn’t trying to write fiction and that if I ever decided to try to write fiction again, it would be better than Cesar’s , though maybe not as popular, since what I would write would be tough, unconcerned with pleasing readers and critics. But for now, I was doing something more important than making up stories.

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Certainty is a habit and a skill, and I had to practice.

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There are few feelings worse than knowing that you’re going to do exactly what your enemy wants you to do.

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I was thinking about how happy I was, and also about the remarkable fact that thinking that I was happy was not destroying my happiness.

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His gift was that he listened to what people thought they were saying, but he heard what they were really saying.

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