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1) "Adult male in a suit, carrying a briefcase, standing in the middle of the sidewalk traffic screaming at his kid, who looks to be about four or five. The volume level grows abusive, 'And if you don't—' the grown-up raising his hand ominously, 'there'll be a consequence.' 'Uh-uh, not today.' Out comes the full auto option again, and presently the screamer is no more, the kid is looking around bewildered, tears still on his little face. The point total in the corner of the screen increments by 500. 'So now he's all alone in the street, big favor you did him.' 'All we have to do—' Fiona clicking on the kid and dragging him to a window labeled Safe Pickup Zone. 'Trustworthy family members,' she explains, 'come and pick them up and buy them pizza and bring them home, and their lives from then on are worry-free.'"

2) "'We don't know what Vyrva's told you about DeepArcher,' sez Justin, 'it's still in beta, so don't be surprised at some awkwardness now and then.' 'Should warn you, I'm not too good at these things, drives my kids crazy, we play Super Mario and the little goombas jump up and stomp on me.' 'It's not a game,' Lucas instructs her. 'Though it does have forerunners in the gaming area,' footnotes Justin, 'like the MUD clones that started to come online back in the eighties, which were mostly text. Lucas and I came of age into VRML, realized we could have the graphics we wanted, so that's what we did, or Lucas did.' 'Only the framing material,' Lucas demurely, 'obvious influences, Neo-Tokyo from Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Metal Gear Solid by Hideo Kojima, or as he's known around my crib, God.'"

3) "Silicon Alley in the nineties provided more than enough work for fraud investigators. The money in play, especially after about 1995, was staggering, and you couldn't expect elements of the fraudster community not to go after some of it, especially HR executives, for whom the invention of the computerized payroll was often confused with a license to steal. If this generation of con artists came up short now and then in IT skills, they made up for it in the area of social engineering, and many entreprenerds, being trusting souls, got taken. But sometimes distinctions between hustling and being hustled broke down. It didn't escape Maxine's notice that, given stock valuations on some start-ups of interest chiefly to the insane, there might not be much difference. How is a business plan that depends on faith in 'network effects' kicking in someday different from the celestial pastry exercise known as a Ponzi scheme? Venture capitalists feared industrywide for their rapacity were observed to surface from pitch sessions with open wallets and leaking eyeballs, having been subjected to nerd-produced videos with subliminal messages and sound tracks featuring oldie mixes that pushed more buttons than a speed freak with a Nintendo 64. Who was less innocent here?"

4) "Vip is known to be doing business with shadowy elements in Quebec, where the zapper industry is flourishing at the moment. Back in the dead of last winter, Maxine got added to a city budget line, on the QT as always, and flown to Montreal to chercher le geek. Manifested into Dorval, checked in to the Courtyard Marriott on Sherbrooke, and went schlepping around the city, one fool's errand after another, down into random gray buildings where many levels below the street and down the corridors you'd hear cafeteria sounds, round a corner and here'd be le tout Montréal having lunch in a lengthy series of eating rooms, strung in an archipelago across the underground city, which in those days seemed to be expanding so rapidly that nobody knew of a reliable map for it all. Plus shopping enough to challenge Maxine's nausea threshold, back ends of Metro stations, bars with live jazz, crepe emporia and poutine outlets, vistas of sparkling new corridor just about to be tenanted by even more shops, all without any need to venture up into the snowbound subzero streets. Finally, at a phone number obtained off a toilet wall at a bar in Mile End, she located one Felix Boïngueaux, who'd been working out of a basement apartment, what they call a garçonnière, off of Saint-Denis, for whom Vip's name didn't just ring a bell but threatened to kick the door in, since there were apparently some late-payment issues. They arranged to meet at an Internet-enabled laundromat called NetNet, soon to be a legend on the Plateau. Felix looked almost old enough to drive."

5) "They get off at 8th Street, find a pizza joint, sit for a while at a sidewalk table. Reg drifts into a patch of philosophical weather. 'Ain't like I was ever Alfred Hitchcock or somethin. You can watch my stuff till you're cross-eyed and there'll never be any deeper meaning. I see something interesting, I shoot it is all. Future of film if you want to know someday, more bandwidth, more video files up on the Internet, everybody'll be shootin everything, way too much to look at, nothin will mean shit. Think of me as the prophet of that.'"

6) "Eric lives in a fifth-floor walk-up studio in Loisaida, a doorless bathroom wedged in one corner and in another a microwave, coffeemaker, and miniature sink. Liquor-store cartons full of personal effects are stacked around haphazardly, and most of the limited floor space is littered with unwashed laundry, Chinese take-out containers and pizza boxes, empty Smirnoff Ice bottles, old copies of Heavy Metal, Maxim, and Anal Teen Nymphos Quarterly, women's shoe catalogs, SDK discs, game controllers and cartridges for Wolfenstein, DOOM, and others. Paint peels from selected ceiling areas, and window treatments are basically street grime. Eric finds a cigarette butt a little longer than the others in a running shoe he's been using for an ashtray and lights up, lurches over to the electric coffee mess, pours out some cold day-old sludge into a mug with a rectangular outline on it and the words CSS IS AWESOME running outside the frame. 'Oh. Want some?'"

7) "Instead of rows of urinals, there are continuous sheets of water descending stainless-steel walls, against which gentlemen, and ladies so inclined, are invited to piss, while for the less adventurous there are stalls of see-through acrylic which in more prosperous days at Tworkeffx also allowed slacker patrols to glance in and see who's avoiding work, custom-decorated inside by high-ticket downtown graffiti artists, with dicks going into mouths a popular motif, as well as sentiments like DIE MICROSOFT WEENIES and LARA CROFT HAS POLYGON ISSUES. No Felix here. They hit the stairs and proceed upward floor by floor, ascending into these bright halls of delusion, prowling offices and cubicles whose furnishings have been picked up from failed dot-coms at bargain prices, too soon in their turn destined for looting by the likes of Gabriel Ice. Partying everywhere. Sweeping into it, swept... Faces in motion. The employees' lap pool with champagne empties bobbing in it. Yuppies who appear only recently to have learned how to smoke screaming at each other. 'Had a brilliant Arturo Fuente the other day!' 'Awesome!' A parade of restless noses snorting lines off of circular Art Deco mirrors from long-demolished luxury hotels dating back to the last time New York saw a market frenzy as intense as the one just ended."

8) "She pretends to sigh. 'It's about the poutine isn't it, you'll never forgive me, once again, Felix, I'm sorry I said that dumb remark, cheap shot.' Going along with it, 'In Montreal it's a diagnostic for moral character—if somebody resists poutine, they resist life.'"

9) "Putting their street faces back on for it. Faces already under silent assault, as if by something ahead, some Y2K of the workweek that no one is quite imagining, the crowds drifting slowly out into the little legendary streets, the highs beginning to dissipate, out into the casting-off of veils before the luminosities of dawn, a sea of T-shirts nobody's reading, a clamor of messages nobody's getting, as if it's the true text history of nights in the Alley, outcries to be attended to and not be lost, the 3:00 AM kozmo deliveries to code sessions and all-night shredding parties, the bedfellows who came and went, the bands in the clubs, the songs whose hooks still wait to ambush an idle hour, the day jobs with meetings about meetings and bosses without clue, the unreal strings of zeros, the business models changing one minute to the next, the start-up parties every night of the week and more on Thursdays than you could keep track of, which of these faces so claimed by the time, the epoch whose end they've been celebrating all night—which of them can see ahead, among the microclimates of binary, tracking earthwide everywhere through dark fiber and twisted pairs and nowadays wirelessly through spaces private and public, anywhere among cybersweatshop needles flashing and never still, in that unquiet vastly stitched and unstitched tapestry they have all at some time sat growing crippled in the service of—to the shape of the day imminent, a procedure waiting execution, about to be revealed, a search result with no instructions on how to look for it?"

10) "'OK', soothingly, 'like, total disclosure? It's been happenin to me too? I'm seeing people in the street who are supposed to be dead, even sometimes people I know were in the towers when they went down, who can't be here but they're here.' They gaze at each other for a while, down here on the barroom floor of history, feeling sucker-punched, no clear way to get up and on with a day which is suddenly full of holes—family, friends, friends of friends, phone numbers on the Rolodex, just not there anymore... the bleak feeling, some mornings, that the country itself may not be there anymore, but being silently replaced screen by screen with something else, some surprise package, by those who've kept their wits about them and their clicking thumbs ready."

11) "'Welcome to the bridge, Ms. Loeffler.' A loutish youth, un-shaven, in cargo shorts and a stained More Cowbell T-shirt. There is a shift in the ambience. The music segues to the theme from Deus Ex, the lights dim, the space is tidied by invisible cyberelves."

12) "They're up on the bridge again, as close to free as the city ever allows you to be, between conditions, an edged wind off the harbor announcing something dark now hovering out over Jersey, not the night, not yet, something else, on the way in, being drawn as if by the vacuum in real-estate history where the Trade Center used to stand, bringing optical tricks, a sorrowful light."

13) "'And Windust—' 'Dotty said he came here more than once after 11 September, haunting the site. Unfinished business, he told her. But I don't think his spirit is here. I think he's down in Xibalba, reunited with his evil twin.' The condemned ghost structures around them seem to draw together, as if conferring. Some patrolman from the karmic police is saying move along folks, it's over, nothing to see here. Xiomara takes Maxine's arm, and they glide off into a premonitory spritzing of rain, a metropolis swept by twilight. Later, back in the apartment, in a widowlike observance, Maxine finds a moment alone and switches off the lights, takes the envelope of cash, and snorts the last vestiges of his punk-rock cologne, trying to summon back something as invisible and weightless and inaccountable as his spirit... Which is down in the Mayan underworld now, wandering a deathscape of hungry, infected, shape-shifting, lethally insane Mayan basketball fans. Like Boston Garden, only different. And later, next to snoring Horst, beneath the pale ceiling, city light diffusing through the blinds, just before drifting downward into REM, good night. Good night, Nick."

1) "Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That's where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go."

2) "Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing. There are objects and people that disappear from your sight or knowledge or possession; you lose a bracelet, a friend, the key. You still know where you are. Everything is familiar except that there is one item less, one missing element. Or you get lost, in which case the world has become larger than your knowledge of it. Either way, there is a loss of control."

3) "There is no distance in childhood: for a baby, a mother in the other room is gone forever, for a child the time until a birthday is endless. Whatever is absent is impossible, irretrievable, unreachable. Their mental landscape is like that of medieval paintings: a foreground full of vivid things and then a wall. The blue of distance comes with time, with the discovery of melancholy, of loss, the texture of longing, of the complexity of the terrain we traverse, and with the years of travel."

4) "Truth lies not only in incidents but in hopes and needs."

5) "It took some time after he arrived in a Spanish town in Mexico before he could stand to wear clothes or sleep anywhere but on the floor. He had gone about naked, shed his skin like a snake, had lost his greed, his fear, been stripped of almost everything a human being could lose and live, but he had learned several languages, he had become a healer, he had come to admire and identify with the Native nations among whom he lived; he was not who he had been. The language of his report to the king is terse, impersonal; his declarative sentences describe only the tangibles of places, foods, encounters, and even these are given in the starkest terms, with little description, little detail. The terms in which to describe the extraordinary metamorphosis of his soul did not exist, at least for him. He was among the first, and the first to come back and tell the tale, of Europeans lost in the Americas, and like many of them he ceased to be lost not by returning but by turning into something else."

6) "Even in the every day world of the present, an anxiety to survive manifests itself in cars and clothes for far more rugged occasions than those at hand, as though to express some sense of the toughness of things and of readiness to face them. But the real difficulties, the real arts of survival, seem to lie in more subtle realms. There, what's called for is a kind of resilience of the psyche, a readiness to deal with what comes next. These captives lay out in a stark and dramatic way what goes on in every life: the transitions whereby you cease to be who you were. Seldom is it as dramatic, but nevertheless, something of this journey between the near and the far goes on in every life. Sometimes an old photograph, an old friend, an old letter will remind you that you are not who you once were, for the person who dwelt among them, valued this, chose that, wrote thus, no longer exists. Without noticing it you have traversed a great distance; the strange has become familiar and the familiar if not strange at least awkward or uncomfortable, an outgrown garment. And some people travel far more than others. There are those who receive as birthright an adequate or at least unquestioned sense of self and those who set out to reinvent themselves, for survival or for satisfaction, and travel far. Some people inherit values and practices as a house they inhabit; some of us have to burn down that house, find our own ground, build from scratch even as a psychological metamorphosis. As a cultural metamorphosis the transition is far more dramatic."

7) "A city is built to resemble a conscious mind, a network that can calculate, administrate, manufacture. Ruins become the unconscious of a city, its memory, unknown, darkness, lost lands, and in this truly bring it to life."

8) "Once I loved a man who was a lot like the desert, and before that I loved the desert. [...] The desert is made first and foremost out of light, at least to the eye and the heart, and you quickly learn that the mountain range twenty miles away is pink at dawn, a scrubby green at midday, blue in evening and under clouds. The light belies the bony solidity of the land, playing over it like emotion on a face, and in this the desert is intensely alive, as the apparent mood of mountains changes hourly, as places that are flat and stark at noon fill with shadows and mystery in the evening, as darkness becomes a reservoir from which the eyes drink, as clouds promise rain that comes like passion and leaves like redemption, rain that delivers itself with thunder, with lightning, with a rise of scents in this place so pure that moisture, dust, and the various bushes all have their own smell in the sudden humidity. Alive with the primal forces of rock, weather, wind, light, and time in which biology is only an uninvited guest fending for itself, gilded, dwarfed, and threatened by its hosts. It was the vastness that I loved and an austerity that was also voluptuous. And the man?"

10) "A story can be a gift like Ariadne's thread, or the labyrinth, or the labyrinth's ravening Minotaur; we navigate by stories, but sometimes we only escape by abandoning them."

1) "'We schedule rallies on a regular basis, and hold them in predominantly Communist neighbourhoods. We provoke chaos. Then, we demonstrate order. The press eats it up. Berlin needs sensation like a fish needs water. ... I hate this place.'"

2) "'Your train's tomorrow morning, my dear? I'm hosting a soirée tonight. You should come— Really. Both of you.' 'I don't— Thank you, but...' 'Darling. Nothing like that. Just a little fundraiser for Herr Hitler.'"

3) "'I imagine changing my mind at the last minute. Shrugging off the demands of family; acting as if I am whole and separate and free to choose. Not a woman. Not a daughter. Not a citizen of Germany.' 'Charlottenburg. Now arriving, Charlottenburg.' 'I imagine changing my mind and getting off at the next stop. Leaving my bags behind, stepping into the sunlight. Turning away from a future that narrows to a single point. I imagine... turning back... toward the city...'"

1) ”The creative mind is like a big pile of jigsaw puzzle pieces. Some pieces were made by other people—inspirational words of advice, an intriguing screenshot from a game you've never heard of, a haunting melody—and some are gained through life experiences. Some pieces are already connected, either because they came that way or because while you were walking down the street or taking a shower they somehow found each other. Sometimes a single piece is missing, and once that piece is uncovered, two other pieces from different ends of the pile can finally be connected. It's important to accumulate many, many jigsaw pieces, since the more you have available, the more things you can build. But eventually you have to sit down and start sifting through the pieces to put them all together. This is the ‘work’ part of creation. It can often be frustrating, like when two pieces seem like they should fit but don't. Sometimes you know that there's a perfect piece around but you're not sure where it is. Is it even in your head? But like any challenging task with a noble purpose, the frustration also gives way to joy, elation, and ultimately satisfaction when you've finished a big part of a new puzzle.”

2) ”I've tried programming a game engine from scratch before, surrounding myself with books like Tricks of the Game-Programming Gurus in an effort to ‘make games the right way,’ but when days of work yield as much as I could make in Game Maker in a few minutes, it's hard to stay motivated. At the beginning of each semester at Berkeley I had the same sort of naive gumption, buying pristine notebooks and attentively jotting down everything the professors said, only to succumb to ennui a week later, my notes devolving into irreverent doodles. Post-school, however, I accepted that I wasn't cut out for academia and programming theory. I no more wanted to program my own game engine than I wanted to fashion my own paintbrushes. This important realization meant I could stop wasting my time trying to be something I wasn't. Instead of being embarrassed about not being a ‘real programmer’ using ‘real programming languages,’ I vowed to make games whichever way felt good to me.”

3) “The Chain's final purpose is to provide permanent features to a randomized landscape. Although randomization gives Spelunky and roguelikes their longevity and makes each playthrough feel unique, it's what stays the same from run to run that makes the world feel real. But without the randomization, playing the game enough times to figure out the Chain would be much more repetitive. The permanence of the Chain and the randomization of the world work in tandem to give you a greater appreciation of the other.”

1) "David Bowie burst on to the international scene at a pivotal point in modern sexual history. The heady utopian dreams of the 1960s, which saw free love as an agent of radical political change, were evaporating. Generational solidarity was proving illusory, while experimentation with psychedelic drugs had expanded identity but sometimes at a cost of disorientation and paranoia. By the early 1970s, hints of decadence and apocalypse were trailing into popular culture. Bowie's prophetic attunement to this major shift was registered in his breakthrough song, 'Space Oddity' (1969), whose wistful astronaut Major Tom secedes from Earth itself. Recorded several months before the Woodstock Music Festival, 'Space Oddity', with its haunting isolation and asexual purity and passivity, forecast the end of the carnival of the Dionysian 1960s."

2) "Music was not the only or even the primary mode through which Bowie first conveyed his vision to the world: he was an iconoclast who was also an image-maker. Bowie's command of the visual was displayed in his acute instinct for the still camera, honed by his attentiveness to classic Hollywood publicity photographs, contemporary fashion magazines and European art films. His flair for choreography and body language had been developed by his study of pantomime and stagecraft with the innovative Lindsay Kemp troupe in London in the late 1960s. Bowie's earliest ambition was to be a painter, and he has continued to paint throughout his life - especially, he has said, when he is having trouble writing songs. The multimedia approaches that were gaining ascendance over the fine arts during the 1960s also helped foster his desire to fuse music with visuals on stage. While working at an advertising agency when he was 16, he learned story-boarding techniques that he later employed for his videos."

3) "By the time we saw him on the front of an album, Aladdin Sane (1973), Ziggy Stardust was already in eclipse. The cover photograph by Brian Duffy with its red-and-blue lightning bolt crossing Bowie's face has become one of the most emblematic and influential art images of the past half century, reproduced or parodied in advertising, media and entertainment worldwide. It contains all of Romanticism, focused on the artist as mutilated victim of his own febrile imagination. Like Herman Melville's Captain Ahab, whose body was scarred by lightning in his quest for the white whale, Bowie as Ziggy is a voyager who has defied ordinary human limits and paid the price. Aladdin sane in the realm of art is a lad insane everywhere else. A jolt of artistic inspiration has stunned him into trance or catatonia. He is blind to the outer world and its 'social contacts' - Bowie's recurrent term for an area of experience that had proved troublesome for Major Tom as well as himself. Pierre La Roche's ingenious zigzag make-up looks at first glance like a bloody wound - an axe blow through the skull of a Viking warrior laid out on his bier. Ziggy appears to be in hibernation or suspended animation, like the doomed astronauts in their mummiform chambers in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which had inspired Bowie's 'Space Oddity'. The background blankness is encroaching like a freezing cryogenic wave upon the figure. It's as clinical as an autopsy, with a glob of extracted flesh lodged on the collarbone. This teardrop of phalliform jelly resembles the unidentifiable bits of protoplasm and biomorphic conglomerations that stud the sexualized landscapes of Salvador Dalí. Also Surrealist are the inflamed creases of Ziggy's arm-pits, which looklike fresh surgical scars as well as raw female genitalia. Like Prometheus, a rebel hero to the Romantics, he has lost his liver for stealing the fire of the gods."

4) "Bowie's theatre of gender resembles the magic-lantern shows or phantasmagoria that preceded the development of motion-picture projection. The multiplicity of his gender images was partly inspired by the rapid changes in modern art, which had begun with neoclassicism sweeping away rococo in the late eighteenth century and which reached a fever pitch before, during and after World War I. Bowie told a TV interviewer in 1976, 'I was always totally bedazzled by all the art forms of the twentieth century, and my interpretation comes out my way of these art forms from Expressionism to Dadaism'. 'Even if the definition isn't understood', he tried to 'break it down' to convey his own 'feeling' to the audience. One of Bowie's leading achievements is his linkage of gender to the restless perpetual motion machine of modern culture. 'I have no style loyalty', he has declared. His signature style is syncretism - a fusion or 'synthesising' (his word) of many styles that is characteristic of late phases such as the hybrid, polyglot Hellenistic era, when religions too seeped into one another. Bowie has in fact used the word 'hybrid' to describe his approach. His stylistic eclecticism in performance genres - combining music hall, vaudeville, pantomime, movies, musical comedy, cabaret, theatre of cruelty, modern dance, French chanson and American blues, folk, rock and soul - created countless new angles of perception and startling juxtapositions."

5) "Broadly speaking, composers of all periods in history can be divided into three groups: genuine innovators, 'second-wave' absorbers who synthesize pioneer developments and adept, polished sweepers who satisfy the public's delayed appetite for what was new five or ten years previously. It is a common misconception that the 'famous', landmark composers like Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner or Gershwin were cutting-edge innovators of the first group, whereas in fact all of the above fall into the second category, as does Bowie. [...] What all these 'second-wave' composers have in common is a highly developed sense of what else is in the ether, what styles are emerging and where to find such ingenuity. They are then able to blend new, exploratory ideas with their own well-developed skills, packaging the ensuing mix for the general audience in such a way as to intrigue and delight without leaving them utterly bewildered. These are rare gifts, sometimes - perhaps always - intuitive rather than studied, which is why the number of composers whose work results in a universal change in stylistic direction remains small. Bowie's name is among them."

6) "[Sir Cristopher Frayling]: We keep talking about Bowie, and actually we're talking about the 'myth of Bowie'. I'm not sure even he knows who he is anymore - rather like some actors. [...They've] played the same parts so often, we confuse them with the person they are playing. Bowie has played lots of parts, but we always talk about him as if they exist. I don't know what lies behind those parts. All I know about is the myth, because that is what we are presented with."

1) "Professor Dr Dr (honoris causa) (mult.) Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld came from a distinguished family about whom little is known, other than they had existed, as von Igelfelds, for a very long time. The obscurity of their early history in no way detracted from the family's distinction; in fact, if anything, it added to it. Anybody can find their way into the history books by doing something egregiously unpleasant: starting a local war, stealing the land and property of others, being particularly vindictive towards neighbours: all of these are well-understood routes to fame and can lead to immense distinction, titles and honorifics. Most people who today are dukes or earls are there because of descent from markedly successful psychopaths. Their ancestors were simply higher achievers than other people's when it came to deceit, expropriation, selfishness and murder. That none of these attributes tends to be recorded in family coats of arms is testimony to the ability of people to brush over or even completely ignore the saliences of the inconvenient past."

2) "'And here we have the Librarian,' said the Rector as Dr Schreiber-Ziegler stepped forward to shake his hand. 'Deputy Librarian,' said Dr Schreiber-Ziegler quickly. 'The Librarian is Herr Huber.' 'Of course,' said the Rector. And then, turning to Herr Uber-Huber, he said, 'Another Huber, you see, Herr Uber-Huber. Bavaria's teeming with people of your name.' 'Hubers, yes,' said Herr Uber-Huber. 'But not so many Uber-Hubers, I think.'"

3) "'What are you doing for dinner?' asked Dr Schneeweiss. 'After this, I mean.' Von Igelfeld looked at his watch. 'I am very tired,' he said. 'I was proposing not to have dinner.' Dr Schneeweiss looked disappointed. 'What about breakfast?' she asked. Von Igelfeld struggled. Was this the American way? Were they all like this? Very friendly and charming, but... 'I am not sure about breakfast,' he said quickly. 'I sometimes miss breakfast.' 'You have to eat some time,' said Dr Schneeweiss, playfully. Von Igelfeld laughed nervously. 'Very funny,' he said. 'Yes, very amusing.'"

4) "The University of Göttingen was proposing to establish a new Chair, with its own new department, and were seeking applicants. The Chair would be in linguistics, with particular reference to historical aspects of the Romance languages. The holder of the Chair would be entitled to twelve assistants and generous grants for academic travel. There were no specified duties, other than to pursue research at the highest level. Unterholzer looked up. 'This is very significant news,' he said. 'It's obviously a very prestigious Chair,' said Herr Huber. 'Only the very best appointments have no duties at all.'"

1) "More than anything, this book is about preparation: In order to be creative you have to know how to prepare to be creative."

2) "It's vital to establish some rituals—automatic but decisive patterns of behavior—at the beginning of the creative process, when you are most at peril of turning back, chickening out, giving up, or going the wrong way."

3) "You can't just dance or paint or write or sculpt. Those are just verbs. You need a tangible idea to get you going. The idea, however minuscule, is what turns the verb into a noun—paint into a painting, sculpt into sculpture, write into writing, dance into a dance."

4) "Scratching is what you do when you can't wait for the thunderbolt to hit you. As Freud said, 'When inspiration does not come to me, I go halfway to meet it.' How is that different from a movie producer calling up a gifted writer and prodding him to suggest a plot line of 'two men and a bear'? If you go halfway, you double your chances of getting a toehold on an idea."

5) "On Saturday, September 8, 2001, my company gave a free performance for two thousand people in the plaza that separated the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center. We were the last people to perform there. Three days later, the day of the attacks, I was putting the finishing touches on a theatrical project to which I had devoted most of my year, preparing for a rehearsal in the late morning at a studio in midtown Manhattan. As the chaos of 9/11 developed, I thought about working with my dancers that day, but decided it was impossible, for so many reasons. I phoned all the dancers to check on their welfare, and I told them there was no obligation to attend rehearsal the next day. Yet they all showed up, ready for work, arriving in a shaken Manhattan, with its bridges and tunnels only just reopened, from Brooklyn, Staten Island, New Jersey, and Westchester County to the north. We could have easily become absorbed by the tragedy, lost in it and paralyzed by it, but what came back to us was the instinct to dance. I began as a dancer, and in those days of pain and shock I went back to where I started. Creating dance is the thing I know best. It is how I recognize myself. Even in the worst of times, such habits sustain, protect, and, in the most unlikely way, lift us up. I cannot think of a more compelling reason to foster the creative habit. It permits me to walk into a white room... and walk out dancing."

1) "I look at those parchments which are deeds saying that Uhtred, son of Uhtred is the lawful and sole owner of the lands that are carefully marked by stones and by dykes, by oaks and by ash, by marsh and by sea, and I dream of those lands, wave-beaten and wild beneath the wind-driven sky. I dream, and know that one day I will take back the land from those who stole it from me. I am an Ealdorman, though I call myself Earl Uhtred, which is the same thing, and the fading parchments are proof of what I own. The law says I own that land, and the law, we are told, is what makes us men under God instead of beasts in the ditch. But the law does not help me take back my land. The law wants compromise. The law thinks money will compensate for loss. The law, above all, fears the bloodfeud. But I am Uhtred, son of Uhtred, and this is the tale of a bloodfeud. It is a tale of how I will take from my enemy what the law says is mine. And it is the tale of a woman and of her father, a king. He was my king and all that I have I owe to him. The food that I eat, the hall where I live and the swords of my men, all came from Alfred, my king, who hated me."

2) "Ragnar's men were rowing and their painted shields lined the ship's sides. They chanted as they rowed, pounding out the tale of how mighty Thor had fished for the dread Midgard Serpent that lies coiled about the roots of the world, and how the serpent had taken the hook baited with an ox's head, and how the giant Hymir, terrified of the vast snake, had cut the line. It is a good tale and its rhythms took us up the River Trente, which is a tributary of the Humber and flows from deep inside Mercia. We were going south, against the current, but the journey was easy, the ride placid, the sun warm and the river's margins thick with flowers. Some men rode horses, keeping pace with us on the eastern bank, while behind us was a fleet of beast-prowed ships. This was the army of Ivar the Boneless and Ubba the Horrible, a host of Northmen, sword-Danes, going to war."

3) "She was heavy, Serpent-Breath, too heavy for a fourteen-year-old, but I would grow into her. Her point tapered more than Ragnar liked, but that made her well-balanced for it meant there was not much weight at the blade's outer end. Ragnar liked weight there, for it helped break down enemy shields, but I preferred Serpent-Breath's agility, given her by Ealdwulf's skill, and that skill meant she never bent nor cracked, not ever, for I still have her. The ash handles have been replaced, the edges have been nicked by enemy blades, and she is slimmer now because she has been sharpened so often, but she is still beautiful, and sometimes I breathe on her flanks and see the patterns emerge in the blade, the curls and wisps, the blue and silver appearing in the metal like magic, and I remember that spring and summer in the woods of Northumbria and I think of Brida staring at her reflection in the newly-made blade."

4) "[As] we waited, Brida, Rorik and I explored Lundene. Rorik had been sick again, and Sigrid had been reluctant to let him travel with his father, but Rorik pleaded with his mother to let him go, Ragnar assured her that the sea voyage would mend all the boy's ills, and so he was here. He was pale, but not sickly, and he was as excited as I was to see the city. Ragnar made me leave my arm rings and Serpent-Breath behind for, he said, the city was full of thieves. We wandered the newer part first, going through malodorous alleys where the houses were full of men working leather, beating at bronze or forging iron. Women sat at looms, a flock of sheep was being slaughtered in a yard, and there were shops selling pottery, salt, live eels, bread, cloth, weapons, any imaginable thing. Church bells set up a hideous clamour at every prayer time or whenever a corpse was carried for burial in the city's graveyards. Packs of dogs roamed the streets, red kites roosted everywhere, and smoke lay like a fog over the thatch that had all turned a dull black. I saw a wagon so loaded with thatching reed that the wagon itself was hidden by its heap of sagging reeds that scraped on the road and ripped and tore against the buildings on either side of the street as two slaves goaded and whipped the bleeding oxen. Men shouted at the slaves that the load was too big, but they went on whipping, and then a fight broke out when the wagon tore down a great piece of rotted roof. There were beggars everywhere; blind children, women without legs, a man with a weeping ulcer on his cheek. There were folk speaking languages I had never heard, folk in strange costumes who had come across the sea, and in the old city, which we explored the next day, I saw two men with skin the colour of chestnuts and Ran told me later they came from Blaland, though he was not certain where that was."

5) "I settled in southern Mercia. I found another uncle, this one called Ealdorman Æthelred, son of Æthelred, brother of Æthelwulf, father of Æthelred, and brother to another Æthelred who had been the father of Ælswith who was married to Alfred, and Ealdorman Æthelred, with his confusing family, grudgingly acknowledged me as a nephew, though the welcome became slightly warmer when presented him with two gold coins and swore on a crucifix that it was all the money I possessed. He assumed Brida was my lover, in which he was right, and thereafter he ignored her."

6) "[None] but the gods saw it, and when his soul was gone I pulled the knife from his throat, retrieved my helmet, and went back to the ship's prow. And waited there until dawn lightened the eastern horizon. Waited till there was a rim of grey at the edge of England. And it was time."

1) "London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foothold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest."

2) "A young gentleman who had inked himself by accident addressed me from the pavement and said, 'I am from Kenge and Carboy's, miss, of Lincoln's Inn.' 'If you please, sir,' said I. He was very obliging, and as he handed me into a fly after superintending the removal of my boxes, I asked him whether there was a great fire anywhere? For the streets were so full of dense brown smoke that scarcely anything was to be seen. 'Oh, dear no, miss,' he said. 'This is a London particular.' I had never heard of such a thing. 'A fog, miss,' said the young gentleman. 'Oh, indeed!' said I."

3) "There was a light sparkling on the top of a hill before us, and the driver, pointing to it with his whip and crying, 'That's Bleak House!' put his horses into a canter and took us forward at such a rate, uphill though it was, that the wheels sent the road drift flying about our heads like spray from a water-mill. Presently we lost the light, presently saw it, presently lost it, presently saw it, and turned into an avenue of trees and cantered up towards where it was beaming brightly. It was in a window of what seemed to be an old-fashioned house with three peaks in the roof in front and a circular sweep leading to the porch. A bell was rung as we drew up, and amidst the sound of its deep voice in the still air, and the distant barking of some dogs, and a gush of light from the opened door, and the smoking and steaming of the heated horses, and the quickened beating of our own hearts, we alighted in no inconsiderable confusion."

4) "While Esther sleeps, and while Esther wakes, it is still wet weather down at the place in Lincolnshire. The rain is ever falling—drip, drip, drip—by day and night upon the broad flagged terrace-pavement, the Ghost's Walk. The weather is so very bad down in Lincolnshire that the liveliest imagination can scarcely apprehend its ever being fine again. Not that there is any superabundant life of imagination on the spot, for Sir Leicester is not here (and, truly, even if he were, would not do much for it in that particular), but is in Paris with my Lady; and solitude, with dusky wings, sits brooding upon Chesney Wold."

5) "'Of course, Esther,' he said, 'you don't understand this Chancery business?' And of course I shook my head. 'I don't know who does,' he returned. 'The lawyers have twisted it into such a state of bedevilment that the original merits of the case have long disappeared from the face of the earth. It's about a will and the trusts under a will—or it was once. It's about nothing but costs now. We are always appearing, and disappearing, and swearing, and interrogating, and filing, and cross-filing, and arguing, and sealing, and motioning, and referring, and reporting, and revolving about the Lord Chancellor and all his satellites, and equitably waltzing ourselves off to dusty death, about costs. That's the great question. All the rest, by some extraordinary means, has melted away.'"

6) "The one great principle of the English law is to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings. Viewed by this light it becomes a coherent scheme and not the monstrous maze the laity are apt to think it. Let them but once clearly perceive that its grand principle is to make business for itself at their expense, and surely they will cease to grumble."

7) "It's time for me to go to that there berryin ground, sir,' he returns with a wild look. 'Lie down, and tell me. What burying ground, Jo?' 'Where they laid him as wos wery good to me, wery good to me indeed, he wos. It's time fur me to go down to that there berryin ground, sir, and ask to be put along with him. I wants to go there and be berried. He used fur to say to me, 'I am as poor as you today, Jo,' he ses. I wants to tell him that I am as poor as him now and have come there to be laid along with him.' 'By and by, Jo. By and by.' 'Ah! P'raps they wouldn't do it if I wos to go myself. But will you promise to have me took there, sir, and laid along with him?' 'I will, indeed.' 'Thankee, sir. Thankee, sir. They'll have to get the key of the gate afore they can take me in, for it's allus locked. And there's a step there, as I used for to clean with my broom. It's turned wery dark, sir. Is there any light a-comin?' 'It is coming fast, Jo.' Fast. The cart is shaken all to pieces, and the rugged road is very near its end. 'Jo, my poor fellow!' 'I hear you, sir, in the dark, but I'm a-gropin—a-gropin—let me catch hold of your hand.' 'Jo, can you say what I say?' 'I'll say anythink as you say, sir, for I knows it's good.' 'Our Father.' 'Our Father! Yes, that's wery good, sir.' 'Which art in heaven.' 'Art in heaven—is the light a-comin, sir?' 'It is close at hand. Hallowed be thy name!' 'Hallowed be—thy—' The light is come upon the dark benighted way. Dead! Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, right reverends and wrong reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day."

8) "Railroads shall soon traverse all this country, and with a rattle and a glare the engine and train shall shoot like a meteor over the wide night-landscape, turning the moon paler; but as yet such things are nonexistent in these parts, though not wholly unexpected. Preparations are afoot, measurements are made, ground is staked out. Bridges are begun, and their not yet united piers desolately look at one another over roads and streams like brick and mortar couples with an obstacle to their union; fragments of embankments are thrown up and left as precipices with torrents of rusty carts and barrows tumbling over them; tripods of tall poles appear on hilltops, where there are rumours of tunnels; everything looks chaotic and abandoned in full hopelessness. Along the freezing roads, and through the night, the post-chaise makes its way without a railroad on its mind."

9) "'[You] will receive our usual notification of the cause being in the paper.' 'To which I shall pay, of course, my usual attention.' 'Still bent, my dear sir,' said Mr. Kenge, showing us through the outer office to the door, 'still bent, even with your enlarged mind, on echoing a popular prejudice? We are a prosperous community, Mr. Jarndyce, a very prosperous community. We are a great country, Mr. Jarndyce, we are a very great country. This is a great system, Mr. Jarndyce, and would you wish a great country to have a little system? Now, really, really!' He said this at the stairhead, gently moving his right hand as if it were a silver trowel with which to spread the cement of his words on the structure of the system and consolidate it for a thousand ages."

10) "'It was a troubled dream?' said Richard, clasping both my guardian's hands eagerly. 'Nothing more, Rick; nothing more.' 'And you, being a good man, can pass it as such, and forgive and pity the dreamer, and be lenient and encouraging when he wakes?' 'Indeed I can. What am I but another dreamer, Rick?' 'I will begin the world!' said Richard with a light in his eyes."

1) "It was beginning to dawn on her then that she didn't know which one she had (technically) lost her virginity to (though odds were good that it was the film student from N.Y.U. and not the townie), even though that seemed to be beside the point for some reason on this post-virginal morning. She was vaguely aware that she was bleeding, but only a little. The guy from N.Y.U. burped in his sleep. There was vomit (whose?) all over Lorna's trashcan. The townie was still laughing, doubled up naked with laughter. Her bra was still on. And she said to no one, though she had wanted to say it to Daniel Miller, 'I always knew it would be like this.'"

2) "We start making out but she forgets her diaphragm so she tries to put it in, squeezing the foam all over her hand but not getting any into it and she's too drunk to know where to put it. I try to fuck her anyway but she keeps moaning 'Peter, Peter' so I stop. I'm thinking about throwing up but do some bong hits instead, then flee. Deal with it. Rock'n'roll."

3) "Tonight. I've spent all afternoon in a bath full of scented water, preparing, cleansing, soaping, shaving, oiling myself for You. I have not eaten in two days. I wait. I am good at that. I listen to old soon-to-be-forgotten songs and wait for Tonight and for You. Wait for that final moment. A moment so filled with such expectance and longing that I almost do not want to witness its occurrence. But I'm ready. One fine day you'll want me for your girl, my radio cries. That's right. Tonight."

4) "There was a dour lunch at Mortimer's with friends of his from Washington. A somber birthday dinner at Lutece with a girl I'd met at The Blue and Gold, Patrick and his girlfriend, Evelyn, who was a junior executive at American Express, and my father. This was two months after he had mother committed to Sandstone and the thing I most remember about that birthday was the fact that no one mentioned it. No one ever mentioned it except for Patrick, who, in confidence to me, whispered, 'It was about time.' Patrick gave me a tie that night."

1) "All it comes down to is that I'm a boy coming home for a month and meeting someone whom I haven't seen for four months and people are afraid to merge."

2) "My mother and I are siting in a restaurant on Melrose, and she's drinking white wine and still has her sunglasses on and she keeps touching her hair and I keep looking at my hands, pretty sure that they're shaking. She tries to smile when she asks me what I want for Christmas. I'm surprised at how much effort it takes to raise my head up and look at her. 'Nothing,' I say. There's a pause and then I ask her, 'What do you want?' She says nothing for a long time and I look back at my hands and she sips her wine. 'I don't know. I just want to have a nice Christmas.'"

3) "A truck with video games strapped in the back passes by and my sisters are driven into some sort of frenzy. 'Follow that video game!' one of them commands. 'Mom, do you think if I asked Dad he'd get me Galaga for Christmas?' the other one asks brushing her short blond hair. I think she's thirteen, maybe. 'What is a Galaga?' my mother asks 'A video game,' one of them says 'You have Atari though,' my mother says."

4) "During the day I'd sit in the living room and try to read the San Francisco Chronicle and she'd walk along the beach and collect seashells, and before too long we started going to bed sometime before dawn and then waking up in the midafternoon, and then we'd open another bottle. One day we took the convertible and drove to a secluded part of the beach. We ate caviar and Blair had chopped up some onions and eggs and cheese, and we brought fruit and these cinnamon cookies Blair was really into, and a six-pack of Tab, because that and the champagne were all Blair would drink, and we'd either jog on the empty shore or try to swim in the rough surf."

5) "'Girls are fucked. Especially this girl. She is so fucked up. On cocaine. On this drug called Preludin, on speed. Jesus.' Trent takes another drag, hands it to me, and then unrolls the window and stares at the sky. We park and then walk through the empty, bright Beverly Center. All the stores are closed and as we walk up to the top floor, where the movies are playing, the whiteness of the floors and the ceilings and the walls is overpowering and we walk quickly through the empty mall and don't see one other person until we get to the theaters. There are a couple of people milling around the ticket booth. We buy our tickets and walk down the hall to theater thirteen and Trent and I are the only persons in it and we share another joint inside the small, hollow room.'"

6) "I get a message that Trent stopped by. He was wearing a really expensive suit, my sisters said, and driving some-one else's Mercedes. 'Friend of mine's,' Trent told them. He also told them to tell me that Scott O.D.'d. I don't know who Scott is. It keeps raining. And that night, after I get three of the weird silent phone calls, I break a glass by throwing it against the wall. No one comes in to see what the sound was. Then I lie on the bed, awake, take twenty milligrams of Valium to come off the coke, but it doesn't get me to sleep. I turn MTV off and the radio on, but KNAC won't come in so I turn the radio off and stare out across the Valley and look at the canvas of neon and fluorescent lights lying beneath the purple night sky and I stand there, nude, by the window, watching the clouds pass and then I lie on my bed and try to remember how many days I've been home and then I get up and pace the room and light another cigarette and then the phone will ring. This is how the nights are when it rains."

7) "'Why?' is all I ask Rip. 'What?' 'Why, Rip?' Rip looks confused. 'Why that? You mean in there?' I try to nod. 'Why not? What the hell?' 'Oh God, Rip, come on, she's eleven.' 'Twelve,' Rip corrects. 'Yeah, twelve,' I say, thinking about it for a moment. 'Hey, don't look at me like I'm some sort of scumbag or something. I'm not.' 'It's...' my voice trails off. 'It's what?' Rip wants to know. 'It's... I don't think it's right.' 'What's right? If you want something, you have the right to take it. If you want to do something, you have the right to do it.' I lean up against the wall. I can hear Spin moaning in the bedroom and then the sound of a hand slapping maybe a face. 'But you don't need anything. You have everything,' I tell him. Rip looks at me. 'No. I don't.' 'What?' 'No, I don't.' There's a pause and then I ask, 'Oh, shit, Rip, what don't you have?' 'I don't have anything to lose.'"

7) "Rip told me that, on some quiet nights, late, you can hear the screeching of tires and then a long silence; a whoosh and then, barely audible, an impact. And sometimes, if one listens very carefully, there are screams in the night that don't last too long. Rip said he doubted that they'll ever get the cars out of there, that they'll probably wait until it gets full of cars and use it as an example and then bury it. And standing there on the hill, overlooking the smog-soaked, baking Valley and feeling the hot winds returning and the dust swirling at my feet and the sun, gigantic, a ball of fire, rising over it, I believed him. And later when we got into the car he took a turn down a street that I was pretty sure was a dead end. 'Where are we going?' I asked. 'I don't know,' he said. 'Just driving.' 'But this road doesn't go anywhere,' I told him. 'That doesn't matter.' 'What does?' I asked, after a little while. 'Just that we're on it, dude,' he said."

8) "Later, in the video arcade, Trent plays a game called Burger Time in which there are all these video hot dogs and eggs that chase around a short, bearded chef and Trent wants to teach me how to play, but I don't want to. I just keep staring at the maniacal wiggling hot dogs and for some reason it's just too much to take and I walk away, looking for something else to play. But all the games seem to deal with beetles and bees and moths and snakes and mosquitoes and frogs drowning and mad spiders eating large purple video flies and the music that goes along with the games makes me feel dizzy and gives me a headache and the images are hard to shake off, even after I leave the arcade."

1) "[Welcome to: Hell (Ontario)]"

2) "'Etienne, did you do the reading?' 'YES I DID THE READING. It's a reductive mess of neo-materialist DRIVEL. Just more proof of this institution's FASCIST priority to perpetuate artworks as righteous conduits of HETEROPATRIARCHAL SUPREMACY." 'So Pam, did you do the reading?' 'please — i just came in here to eat my salad.'"

3) "'I WORK IN AN HOUR. YOU CAN CRASH HERE ON MY COUCH. YOU HAVEN'T BLINKED IN SEVENTEEN MINUTES.'"

4) "'Did you see Pam's painting today? So boring.' 'Your rants about Derrida last night were way more tedious, to be honest.' '... You have vomit in your hair.' 'Yes, I know.'"

5) "'Kaylee, you're in an ART program. If all you care about is marks, then maybe you shouldn't BE here. We can't keep having conversations about marks. We need to have a conversation about art, FOR ONCE. At THIS LEVEL, you should have a basic understanding of― ... It's not easy to make something that feels right, is it?' 'snf. no.' 'Trying to make things to make other people happy is creative poison. It causes you to make safe choices. Do you LIKE this horse drawing?' 'Not really. I really like horses though.' 'Kaylee, you can keep making art about horses, really. BUT you can also make art about something else completely. You have choices.' 'But, how do you know when to commit to something... or when to move on?' '...I don't know.'"

1) “[Like] so many wonderful moments in life and art, Shadow of the Colossus is defined by the space between its lines: the gulf between its quieter, contemplative moments and its tremendous spectacle. Strung end to end, its titanic battles would make for an amazing if exhausting barrage of action. But driving your horse across an imposing sunbaked expanse, twisting up through shade-mottled woods, only to find your ageless, unwitting foe at rest in the stillness of a lake gives the encounter exactly the breathing room it needs.”

2) “Valus is Ueda’s favorite colossus, a critically important introduction to the true meat of the game—one that took significant trial-and-error to get just right. It feels unfair until the moment it doesn't, all the accomplishment of fighting a ‘boss’ without the typical buildup. But at the same time I feel a bit conflicted by the violence of my actions and the reward of a solemn, uncelebrated death. It's clear even in this first victory that what I'm doing is wrong on some level, though I've journeyed too far to not continue at least a bit further down this road, into the depths of Dormin's deal.”

3) “As I clamber up his shoulder, there's a moment when Gaius seems to have forgotten me, looking out over the beauty of the sprawling lands, still and unthreatened. It doesn't last long, though, and he turns his attention back to the nuisance. These final moments of fighting Gaius are monumental—it feels like a fight to the death at the top of the world, a clear view for miles in every direction save for the writhing titan beneath me. It's also the first time that the scale of the game is truly communicated. Wander, as a relative ant, on the apex of a stories-tall giant, who's standing on an arena, on top of a towering column of rock, in a lake, in a crater. Somewhere far below, my speck of a horse runs back and forth nervously on the shore.”

4) “Andy Nealen, an expert on minimalist design and an assistant professor of computer science and game design at New York University, regularly uses Shadow as a reference point in his classes. He's also the co-creator of Osmos, a serene puzzle game (and early App Store success) about colliding with smaller objects and avoiding larger ones in a visual Petri dish. Nealen tells me via e-mail, ‘Minimalism allows a designer to have a strong vision, but not describe it in every single detail, thus leaving the player to explore the elements, their connections, and their dynamical meaning. It also means only leaving the best parts in the design: If one part is better than the others, the others become a liability, and need to be removed or radically improved. The best designs and design processes I have witnessed have a 'cutting foor’ that is ten times the size of the final game.’”

5 “[Before] I can fully stand he hits me again—and again—until I'm close to death. I finally manage to dodge one of his blows, luring him back across the courtyard and putting several obstacles between us as I climb back around and above him. He charges the column supporting the upper level that I'm now on and it comes crashing down, shattering off much of his armor and exposing a sigil on his furry back. Without his armor, Cenobia appears much smaller, and the impact of his charges now dizzies him, giving me a moment to jump onto his back. The rest is a messy, violent affair, as Wander is sprayed with the black blood of this bucking beast as its life is drained away. He's become vulnerable as I've become savage, and the city shortly falls silent again.”

6) ”It feels lonely sometimes, having such an intensely personal attachment to a piece of art. While Shadow has affected so many others, no one can really understand what it means to me. Just as I can never understand what it means to them. Or for that matter, anyone's favorite anything. There's a chemistry, possibly even a spirituality, in connecting so deeply with someone else's creation. In many ways, I define my life by relentlessly sharing the things I love with the people I care about. But that may ultimately come from a selfish place. Maybe it's less about wanting others to experience the same magic and humanity that I felt, and more about wanting to be better understood in some small way.”

1) "'I'm working towards a psychology degree to become a therapist.' 'COOL. SO YOU CAN TELL ME WHY MY LIFE IS SUCH A DISASTER.' 'Haha!' '"LOL"'"

2) "'OMG HAHA - Did you just take a pic of me? 'Oh HAY, I look pretty cute. Can you post that to fb?' 'Ok yeah, I'll post it later or something.' 'POST IT NOW' 'Okay! God.' [later] [Wendy commented on your photo] 'LOL OMG I LOOK SO AWKWARD HAHA!'"

3) "'The internet is an indispensable resource for all of that French philosophy that your smarter friends seem to effortlessly inject into their artistic practice.'"

4) "'I shouldn't have to take her abuse. I should stand up for myself for once. 'So fucking what if I burn bridges. Maybe I'm not meant to be an artist ANYWAY. 'Maybe I'm supposed to be marginal and miserable and broke FOREVER.' 'Isn't the water great?' 'IT'S SO RELAXING!'"

5) "'Well, you seem pretty laissez-faire considering the looming potential to destroy our own lives.' 'If by 'laissez-faire' you mean a hollowed-out, shallow, directionless husk, then sure. Sure am.'"