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that the forks and parallels of the roads taken and not taken were all being travelled by the same people at the same time, the visible people and the shadow people, and that the world as it was could never be more than a fraction of the world, for the real also consisted of what could have happened but didn’t, that one road was not better or worse than any other road

always did not mean always but most of the time, and at those rare times when the somber expectations of always were proved to be wrong, the only proper response was to thank the gods for their random act of benevolence and then return to the somber expectations of always, even if one’s first encounter with the principle of most of the time thundered in the bones with the force of a holy benediction.

No more bouts of morose introspection, no more journeys into the bogs of brooding self-torment, no more turning against himself, which was a weakness that had always made him less than he should have been.

It was’t just a new love but a new kind of love, a new way of being with someone that translated into a new way of being himself, a better way because of who and what and how she was with him, the way of being himself he had always aspired to but had never managed to accomplish in the past.

what a grand and beautiful world it was if you didn’t stop to look at it too closely.

old and weary souls could be bitter at times, and angry at times, most especially against the souls of the ones who did not feel that same bitterness and anger.

You’re your own man, and because of that you’re a thrilling person to be with, but also because of that you’re never going to fit in anywhere, which is a good thing, I believe, since you’ll be able to go on being your own man, and a man who is his own man is a better man than most men, even if he doesn’t fit in.

That was the one true advantage of having money over not having money, he decided—not that you could buy more things with it but that you no longer had to walk around with that infernal thought bubble hanging over your head.

Most people were scared, but scared was a stupid way to live, Ferguson felt, a dishonest and demoralizing way to live, a dead-end life, a dead life.

He felt more intimately connected to his own feelings and at the same time more remote from them, almost detached, indifferent, as if during the writing of the book he had paradoxically become both a warmer and a colder person, warmer by the fact that he had opened up his insides and exposed them to the world, colder by the fact that he could look at those insides as if they belonged to someone else, a stranger

to be able to live for a while in the large, densely crowded spaces of memory with no interference from the present, nothing to distract him from living in the past for as long as he needed to be there.

Ferguson understood that the world was made of stories, so many different stories that if they were all gathered together and put into a book, the book would be nine hundred million pages long.

how could you ever learn anything if you only talked to people who thought exactly as you did?

You have to learn everything you can, (...) and then you have to forget it, and what you can’t forget will create the foundation of your work

reading books that dwelled only on the familiar inevitably taught you things you already knew, and reading books that dwelled only on the strange taught you things you didn’t need to know

for the point was that he needed to be loved, loved more than most people needed to be loved, entirely loved without respite through every waking minute if his life, loved even when he did things that made him unlovable, especially when reason demanded that he not be loved

He was beginning to understand how fragile he was, how difficult it was for him to steer his way through even the smallest conflicts, especially conflicts brought on by his own flaws and stupidities,

walking around with anger inside you was a bad way to live, he told Ferguson, it was pointless and self-destructive and cruel to the people who depended on you not to be angry, specially when the cause of your anger was something you couldn’t control.

in order to tell the story of an event that had occurred in the real world you paradoxically had to begin with the last thing that happened rather than the first, the effect rather than the cause

he was no longer in the judgement business, he had given up his compulsion to hunt out the flaws and weaknesses in others because he had learned by now that he was just as weak and flawed as they were, and if he wanted to grow up into the kind of person he was expecting himself to be, he would have to keep his mouth shut and his eyes open and never look down on anyone again.

We feel what we feel, he wrote, and we’re not responsible for our feelings. For our actions, yes, but not for what we feel.

the world around him was continually being shaped by the world within him, just as everyone else’s experience of the world was shaped by his own memories, and while all people were bound together by the common space they shared, their journeys through time were all different, which meant that each person lived in a slightly different world from everyone else.

Time moved in two directions because every step into the future carried a memory of the past

a crowd could sometimes express a hidden truth that no one person in the crowd would have dared to express on his own

two was infinitely more satisfying than one, and only by seducing the seducer could he thank him for the pleasure of being seduced.

I’m an intelligent pessimist, meaning a pessimist who has occasional flashes of optimism. Nearly everything happens for the worst, but not always, you see, nothing is ever always, but I’m always expecting the worst, and when the worst doesn’t happen, I get so excited I begin to sound like an optimist.

walking with Federman was above all an exercise in the art of paying attention, and paying attention, Ferguson discovered, was the first step in learning how to be alive.

he wasn’t just one person but a collection of contradictory selves, and each time he was with a different person, he himself was different as well.

Anger and disappointment could take you just so far, he realized, but without curiosity you were lost.

he felt ashamed of his unhappiness, revolted by his inability to accept the bounties he had been given, but feelings were feelings, and he couldn’t stop himself from feeling angry and disappointed, for no act of will could change what a person felt.