"All I ever really want to know is how other people are making it through life--where do they put their body, hour by hour, and how to they cope inside of it."

"I clicked through all the pictures Brigitte had taken so far. What was I looking for? I supposed I was looking for calendars. More pictures of calendars. And there they were. Everyone had them, and they were all hardworking calendars. They seemed weirdly compulsive for a moment, as if I'd stumbled on a group of calendar fanatics, and then I remembered that we all used to have these, until very, very recently. We all laid our intricately handwritten lives across the grid and then put it on the wall for everyone to see. For a split second I could feel the way things were, the way time itself used to feel, before computers."

It Chooses You, Miranda July 

"the steward of your legacy."

"Pam opened another album, and as we looked at pictures of the rich, white strangers on a boat, I had the queasy feeling that I was Pam, in reverse. She'd invented all kinds of happiness for these people who seemed boring to me, while her immigrant story struck me as inherently poignant and profound. And probably neither of us was entirely wrong; it's just that we were, more than anything, sick of our own problems."

It Chooses You, Miranda July

"We had gone to the place where all living things come from; it was fetid and smelly and cloyingly sweet, filled with raw meat and curling horns, her face was smashed, everything was breeding and cross-breeding, newborn and biblical. And I couldn't take it. The fullness of her life was menacing to me--there was no room for invention, no place for the kind of fictional conjuring that makes me feel useful, or feel anything at all. She wanted me to just actually be there and eat fruit with her."

It Chooses You, Miranda July 

"He looked at the ceiling, summoning a vision as if I had asked him to actually see his own future."

It Chooses You, Miranda July 

"It occurred to me that everyone's story matters to themselves, so the more I listened, the more she wanted to talk."

It Chooses You, Miranda July 

"Naturally, nobody built hotels in Cocoa Beach, only motels; and when they built apartment houses, they built them like motels, so that you could drive up o your own door. At neither the motels nor the apartment houses did you have to go through a public lobby to get to your room. A minor architectural note, one might say--and yet in Cocoa Beach, like so many towns of the new era, this one fact did more than the pill to encourage what would later be rather primly named 'the sexual revolution.'"

The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe

"The real problem was that reporters violated the invisible walls of the fraternity. They blurted out questions and spoke boorish words about... all the unspoken things!--about fear and bravery (they wold say the words!) and how you felt at such-and-such a moment! It as obscene! They presumed a knowledge an an intimacy they did not have and had no right to."

The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe