A truly magnificent thing about the way the brain was coded, Sam thought, was that it could say "Excuse me" while meaning "Screw you." Unless they we… - Gabrielle Zevin

A truly magnificent thing about the way the brain was coded, Sam thought, was that it could say "Excuse me" while meaning "Screw you.

But people — the ordinary, the decent and basically honest — couldn't get through the day without that one indispensable bit of programming that allowed you to say one thing and mean, feel, even do, another.

He knows she isn't perfect. She knows he definitely isn't perfect. They know there's no such thing as perfect.

Daddy used to say that calling a person a romantic was just another way of saying he or she acted without regard for conseqences.

A good game designer know that clinging to a few early ideas about a project can cut off the potential for the work. Sadie did not feel the Naomi was altogether a person yet, which was another thing that one could not admit. So many of the mothers she knew said that their children were exactly themselves from the moment they appeared in the world. But Sade disagreed. What person was a person without language? Tastes? Preferences? Experiences? And on the other side of childhood, what grown-up wanted to believe that they had emerged from their parents fully made? Sadie knew that she herself had not become a person until recently. It was unreasonable to expect a child to emerge whole cloth. Naomi was a pencil sketch off a person who, at some point, would be a fully 3D character.