“The thing about living alone is that it gives you a lot of time to think. You don't necessarily reach any conclusions, because wisdom is largely a function of intelligence and self-awareness, not time on your hands. But you do become very good at thinking yourself into endless loops of desperation in half the time it would take a normal person.”

“All of their faces are cluttered with the shrapnel of rebellion, as if a grenade of alienation has exploded in their midst, piercing every possible soft point of flesh-from earlobes and nostrils to eyebrows, lips, and tongues-with metal studs and rings.”

“Everyone wants to know how you can tell when it's true love, and the answer is this: when the pain doesn't fade and the scars don't heal, and it's too damned late. Jonathan Tropper, from The Book of Joe”

“It's hard to know where to start. Things have been a mess for so many years that trying to pin down a starting point is like trying to figure out where your skin starts. All you can ever really know is that it's wrapped around you, sometimes a little tighter than you'd like.But clearly there have been some mistakes. Bad ones. You can tell that just by looking at him.”

“I'm a novelist first, and I wrote a bunch of books, and everything I write, I just find people are more interesting when there's an element of humor to it.”

“I whispered to Dad during Rosh Hashanah services, "Do you believe in God?" "Not really," he said. "No.""Then why do we come here?"He sucked thoughfully on his Tums tablet and put his arm around me, draping me under his musty woolen prayer shawl, and then shrugged. "I've been wrong before," he said.And that pretty much summed up what theology there was to find in the Foxman home.”

“You want to move on, but to do that you have to let her go, and you don't want to let her go, so you don't move on.”

“Sometimes it’s heartbreaking to see your siblings as the people they’ve become. Maybe that’s why we all stay away from each other as a matter of course.”

“...she'll cry, and if she does, I probably will, and then she'll have found a way in, and I will not let her pierce my walls in a Trojan horse of sympathy.”

“And I just want to tell you, at some point it doesn’t matter who was right and who was wrong. At some point, beingangry is just another bad habit, like smoking, and you keep poisoningyourself without thinking about it.”

“...you realize that you don't understand yourself any better than you understand anyone else.”