People have to be patient when they're talking to a nervous person. - Jonathan Lethem

Every room I've lived in since I was given my own room at eleven was lined with, and usually overfull of, books. My employment in bookstores was always continuous with my private hours: shelving and alphabetizing, building shelves, and browsing — in my collection and others — in order to understand a small amount about the widest possible number of books. Such numbers of books are constantly acquired that constant culling is necessary; if I slouch in this discipline, the books erupt. I've also bricked myself in with music — vinyl records, then compact discs. My homes have been improbably information-dense, like capsules for survival of a nuclear war, or models of the interior of my own skull. That comparison — room as brain — is one I've often reached for in describing the rooms of others, but it began with the suspicion that I'd externalized my own brain, for anyone who cared to look.

The stumbling block will turn out to be the traditional one for students of consciousness: the flashlight is incapable of shining on itself, so we can't trust what its light reveals.

I raised that kid like I was running an egg-and-spoon race through a minefield, and he was the egg.