Who'll hold families together, if everybody has to live? Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want. - John Updike

Nelson wonders why, no matter how cheerful and blameless the day's activities have been, when you wake in the middle of the night there is guilt in the air, a gnawing feeling of everything being slightly off, wrong – you in the wrong, and the world too, as if darkness is a kind of light that shows us the depth we are about to fall into.

Something about being helpless in bed, people hit you up for sympathy. They've got you where they want you.

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.