Private Equity by Carrie Sun, r. Feb. 2025

Page 14

The finishes were opulent—marble, glass, steel, wood, and leather in shades of beige and cream, tinseled

with cobalt—but that was not what got me. Most offices I had known had harsh fluorescent lighting

reminding you that you were hard at work. Here, the light raying from the seamless ceiling, softened

through distance and angles and filters, glowed. It mixed with nature, with its reflection off Central

Park, and caused whoever was in the room to feel alive with the same starry force that made the view—

the sky, the moon, heaven, and earth.

Page 16

This was the culture from which I was trying to escape, evinced by an offhand remark a coworker at

Fidelity made to me one night: “I basically sit on my ass and do nothing and make millions. What could

be better than that?”

Page 62

I was promoted, and a year later promoted again, to a co–portfolio manager, but I was not sure I

deserved any of this: workers around the world were losing their jobs, homes, and retirement savings as

I watched my base and bonus and profit sharing go up and up and up with, honestly, very little effort on

my part—and this felt cosmically wrong. I did not feel like I was adding value to the world. I felt

insulated from harm, disconnected from humanity. I had to get out.

Page 62

An affair would be so inefficient.

Page 73

Jamie said he valued, in order of importance, family, humanity, country, then his company. J.P.

Morgan—last. I did not, for a second, doubt that he believed he held those values.

Page 91

But this kind of positive, helpful bias toward a subset of people (as opposed to a negative, harmful bias

toward those not in the set) nevertheless results in social hierarchy and tiered societies.

Page 92

I could not help but observe other people’s wrap jobs. We were efficient, until we were wasteful; we

were world-class until we weren’t. Without inflation I’d have to give Boone the same grade as I would

give his microwaving skills: B.

Page 97

I questioned my reality and doubted my doubt, unsure if I felt nothing or something or perhaps

everything.

Page 140

“Practice. That’s all it is. If you practice enough, you can sense things. You know where the open ice will

be.” Watching the three men interact I could not help but notice the banality of genius. It occurred to me

that Carbon did not have any superpowers beyond the boring and total efficiency of the enterprise.

People worked like machines, which was to say they made goals, they accomplished them—this was the

genius of following through. The genius of training your brain through practice and more practice to

encode as much as possible into procedural memory so there would be no deliberations of the “Do I feel

like doing this now?” sort; no excuses of the “I’m tired” or “I’m having a bad day” sort. There was will,

followed by action. Mean it, do it. There was no such thing as a slump. But I wondered if the genius here

could also be the horror: Your brain might not have full control over exactly which parts of your

experiences in daily practice to encode. You might, through no conscious fault of your own, encode a

lack of moral sensitivity if every second of every day your attention was fixated on self-interest,

winning, profits, money, crushing it, killing it, and destroying your competition.

3

Page 159

He was unmoved by temptation, manias, fads; pinned behind his monitor was a quote from Steve Jobs:

“I’m actually as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done.”

Page 162

The name of the game at Carbon, at least with Boone, was modesty, downplaying, understatement.

Acting like a start-up when you’re the clear incumbent because concealing your position—being

underestimated—lets you have a much bigger playbook.

Page 195

I spent every second reacting to the world, reacting as though a virus had infected my phone and

toggled all the switches to allow notifications to flash/buzz/sound all the time. If, as Boone believed,

how you spent your days was how you lived your life, then I was not in control of my life.

Page 195

I had urgency fatigue.

Page 195

Work felt like a series of nested em dashes, living inside a sentence that could never reach its period.

Page 237

I have never voted. Some of this is the result of an intentional deprioritization of politics; but most of it

is because some other part of me knows how much I feel compelled to identify with winners, which

scares me: I fear I might sympathize with the wrong team.

Page 269

No. There was only money. Everything else was a side effect.

Page 270

If you have the highest returns and the highest pay, nearly everything will solve itself because the

people—internal workers and external LPs—will convince themselves that they want to be a part of

your mission. Greed is good because it makes things predictable. No need to coerce or enforce or foist

any delusions when you have people volunteering to do the labor of self-persuasion.

Page 300

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 300

But the unconscious mind is an ocean where the conscious mind is a wave; I’m much more like her than

I’m not.

Page 306

Above all, I feared learning my mother had been correct when she said, “When you grow up, you’ll learn:

no one cares about you except your family.”

Page 323

In AIM, at Carbon, I saw a pattern hidden in plain sight: A small decision weighed down by repetition

becomes a massive habit. It becomes inertia.

Page 325

Companies used to go public at an earlier stage in their life cycles, making their hyper-growth phase

accessible to the average investor. But large and larger pools of capital came rushing in, which gave

start-ups an option to stay private longer, delaying their IPOs. This was often a win-win: a start-up

might not want (or be ready for) the pressure of public financial reporting; private investors might get

special access to the period of highest growth. Access is edge. Constraint is destiny. The loser, then, and

always, was the retail investor, who most likely did not have the privilege to invest in the start-up or in

the private fund. Carbon, in my view, was occupying a territory of the market to which all of the public

should have access.

Atomic Habits by James Clear, r. Dec. 2024

 p. 18 Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits. Your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning habits. Your clutter is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. You get what you repeat.

p. 33 The ultimate form of intrinsic motivation is when a habit becomes part of your identity. It's one thing to say I'm the type of person who wants this. It's something very different to say I'm the type of person who is this.

p. 38 Every time you choose to perform a bad habit, it's a vote for that identity. The good news is that you don't need to be perfect. In any election, there are going to be votes for both sides. You don't need a unanimous vote to win an election; you just need a majority. It doesn't matter if you cast a few votes for a bad behavior or an unproductive habit. Your goal is simply to win the majority of the time.

p. 87 Stop thinking about your environment as filled with objects. Start thinking about it as filled with relationships. Think in terms of how you interact with the spaces around you.

p. 92 Instead, "disciplined" people are better at structuring their lives in a way that does not require heroic willpower and self-control. In other words, they spend less time in tempting situations. The people with the best self-control are typically the ones who need to use it the least. It's easier to practice self-restraint when you don't have to use it very often. So, yes, perseverance, grit, and willpower are essential to success, but the way to improve these qualities is not by wishing you were a more disciplined person, but by creating a more disciplined environment.

p. 121 The human mind knows how to get along with others. It wants to get along with others. This is our natural mode. You can override it – you can choose to ignore the group or to stop caring what other people think – but it takes work. Running against the grain of your culture requires extra effort. When changing your habits means challenging the tribe, change is unattractive. When changing your habits means fitting in with the tribe, change is very attractive.

p. 130 Even the tiniest action is tinged with the motivation to feel differently than you do in the moment. When you binge-eat or light up or browse social media, what you really want is not a potato chip or a cigarette or a bunch of likes. What you really want is to feel different.

p. 163 People often think it's weird to get hyped about reading one page or meditating for one minute or making one sales call. But the point is not to do one thing. The point is to master the habit of showing up.

p. 164 The more you ritualize the beginning of a process, the more likely it becomes that you can slip into the state of deep focus that is required to do great things.

p. 165 Nearly everyone can benefit from getting their thoughts out of their head and onto paper, but most people give up after a few days or avoid it entirely because journaling feels like a chore. The secret is to always stay below the point where it feels like work. Greg McKeown, a leadership consultant from the United Kingdom, built a daily journaling habit by specifically writing less than he felt like. He always stopped journaling before it seemed like a hassle. Ernest Hemingway believed in similar advice for any kind of writing. "The best way is to always stop when you are going good," he said.

p. 174 When the effort required to act on your desires becomes effectively zero, you can find yourself slipping into whatever impulse arises at the moment. The downside of automation is that we can find ourselves jumping from easy task to easy task without making time for more difficult, but ultimately more rewarding, work.

p. 192 Incentives can start a habit. Identity sustains a habit.

p. 201 Whenever this happens to me, I try to remind myself of a simple rule: never miss twice.... Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit.... Lost days hurt you more than successful days help you.... "The first rule of compounding: Never interrupt it unnecessarily...." This is why the "bad" workouts are often the most important ones.... Don't put up a zero. Don't let losses eat into your compounding.

p. 235 Variable rewards or not, no habit will stay interesting forever. At some point, everyone faces the same challenge on the journey of self-improvement: you have to fall in love with boredom.

P. 249 Habits deliver numerous benefits, but the downside is that they can lock us into our previous patterns of thinking and acting – even when the world is shifting around us. Everything is impermanent. Life is constantly changing, so you need to periodically check in to see if your old habits and beliefs are still serving you.

p. 252 Success in not a goal to reach or a finish line to cross. It is a system to improve, an endless process to refine.

p. 259 Happiness is simply the absence of desire.

p. 261 Being curious is better than being smart. Being motivated and curious counts for more than being smart because it leads to action.

My Struggle #4 by Karl Ove Knausgaard, r. Dec. 2024

Page 19 It was a good feeling going back into my flat. It was the first place I’d ever been able to call mine, and I enjoyed even the most trivial activities, like hanging up my jacket or putting the milk in the fridge. 

Page 22 What Hilde and I did, occasionally with Eirik, occasionally on our own, was talk. Sitting cross-legged on the floor of her cellar flat, with a bottle of wine between us, the night pressing against the windows, we talked about books we had read, about political issues that interested us, about what awaited us in life, what we wanted to do and what we could do. 

Page 60 Everything that had happened in the past five years rose like steam from a cup when I played a record, not in the form of thoughts or reasoning, but as moods, openings, space. Some general, others specific. If my memories were stacked in a heap on the back of my life’s trailer, music was the rope that held them together and kept it, my life, in position. 

Page 105 Half an hour later we were walking up the hill from the flat. I was drunk in that pure joyful way you can be from white wine, when your thoughts collide with one another like bubbles and what emerges when they burst is pleasure. 

Page 157 Over the white timber fence you could see sections of the river, greenish in the bright sunlight, and the roofs of the houses on the other side. There were trees everywhere, these beautiful green creations that you never really paid much attention to, just walked past; you registered them but they made no great impression on you in the way that dogs or cats did, but they were actually, if you lent the matter some thought, present in a far more breathtaking and sweeping way. 

Page 164 Oh, this is the song about being sixteen years old and sitting on a bus and thinking about her, the one, not knowing that feelings will slowly, slowly, weaken and fade, that life, that which is now so vast and so all-embracing, will inexorably dwindle and shrink until it is a manageable entity that doesn’t hurt so much, but nor is it as good. 

Page 195 Outside it was dark, autumn was wrapping its hand around the world, and I loved it. The darkness, the rain, the sudden cracks in the past that opened when the smell of damp grass and soil rose up at me from a ditch somewhere or when car headlights illuminated a house, all somehow caught and enhanced by the music in the Walkman I always carried with me. 

Page 208 I told her everything else and she listened, occasionally with a genuinely surprised expression on her face, as though she hadn’t thought about what I was saying. Although she had, of course, it was just that her empathy was so immense that she forgot herself and her own thoughts. Sometimes it was as if we were like minds. Or equals at least. Then something changed and the distance between us became apparent. 

Page 214 The sky above the yellow deciduous trees and the green conifers was dense and gray. The grayness, and the fact that all visibility stopped there, just a few meters above, increased the intensity of the colors; the yellow, the green, and the black were hurled into space, as it were, yet blocked by the gray sky, and that must have been why the colors shone with such abandon. They had the power to lift off and disappear into eternity but couldn’t, and so the energy was burned up where they were. 

Page 231 The countryside was like a tub filled to the brim with darkness. The next morning the bottom slowly became visible as the light was poured in and seemingly diluted the darkness. 

Page 291 “Why didn’t you just leave?” I said. “Leave Dad?” I nodded with my mouth full. “I’ve wondered about that many times myself,” she said. “I don’t know.” We ate for a while without speaking. It was odd to think we had been in Sørbøvåg only this morning. It seemed like much longer. It was a different world. “Well, I don’t have a good answer to that,” she said at length.

Page 295 We don’t live our lives alone, but that doesn’t mean we see those alongside whom we live our lives. 

Page 300 Yngve and Kristin had sat down on the sofa. They were looking around the way you do when you are somewhere new, discreetly absorbing their surroundings, constantly aware of each other, not necessarily with their glances but in the total way that lovers can be when everything is about the two of them. Kristin was a miracle of joy and naturalness, and that rubbed off on Yngve, he was fully open to it and wore an almost childish glow that he only had when he was with her. 

Page 343 The other letters were from Hilde and Mom. I didn’t open them until I got home, letters were a party, everything had to be perfect when I read them. Steaming coffee in a cup, music on the stereo, a rollie in my hand, and one ready on the table. I started with the one from Mom. 

Page 360 When darkness fell I let it enter the flat, too, apart from on the desk, where a small lamp shone like an island in the night. There was me and my writing, an island of light in the darkness, that was how I imagined it.

Page 366 The days became shorter, and they became shorter quickly, as though they were racing toward the darkness. The first snow arrived in mid-October, went after a few days, but the next time it fell, at the beginning of November, it came with a vengeance, day after day it tumbled down, and soon everything was packed in thick white cushions of snow, apart from the sea, which with its dark, clean surface and terrible depths lay nearby like an alien and menacing presence, like a murderer who has moved into a neighboring house and whose unheeded knife glints on the kitchen table. 

Page 367 An avalanche blocked the road, a ferry service was started, and the fact that you were only able to leave twice a day increased the feeling that this village was the only village, these people the only people. I was still getting lots of letters, and spent a lot of time answering them, but the life they represented was no longer the one that counted, the one that did was this: up in the morning, out into the snow, up the hill to school, and into class. Stay there all day, in a low-roofed, illuminated bunker, weighted down by the darkness, go home, go shopping, have dinner, and then in the evening train in the gym with the youngest fishermen, watch TV at school, swim in the pool, or sit at home reading or writing until it was so late that I could go to bed and sleep off the dead hours before the next day started. 

Page 383 While I washed my hands I stared at my reflection in the mirror. The singular feeling that arose when you looked at your own eyes, which so purely and unambiguously expressed your inner state, of being both inside and outside, filled me to the hilt for a few intense seconds, but was forgotten the moment I left the room, in the same way that a towel on a hook or a bar of soap in the small hollow in the sink also were, all these trivialities that have no existence beyond the moment, but hang or lie undisturbed in dark, empty rooms until the door is opened the next time and another person grasps the soap, dries his hands on the towel, and examines his soul in the mirror. 

Page 419 I had always liked darkness. When I was small I was afraid of it if I was alone, but when I was with others I loved it and the change to the world it brought. Running around in the forest or between houses was different in the darkness, the world was enchanted, and we, we were breathless adventurers with blinking eyes and pounding hearts. 

Page 431 I unpacked my clothes, ate some supper, read in bed for a couple of hours before switching off the light and going to sleep. 

Page 440 Why didn’t they drink? Why didn’t everyone drink? Alcohol makes everything big, it is a wind blowing through your consciousness, it is crashing waves and swaying forests, and the light it transmits gilds everything you see, even the ugliest and most revolting person becomes attractive in some way, it is as if all objections and all judgments are cast aside in a wide sweep of the hand, in an act of supreme generosity, here everything, and I do mean everything, is beautiful. 

Page 469 People were so preoccupied with trivialities, they kept searching until they found something and then they went for the jugular instead of keeping sight of the bigger picture, here we all are, humans on one earth, we’re only here for the short term, in the midst of all this wondrous creation, grass and trees, badgers and cats, fish and sea, beneath a star-strewn sky, and you get worked up over a broken guitar string? A snapped drumstick? Some silly bed linen that hasn’t been returned? Come on, what’s the matter with all of you?

Page 473 “Five more minutes,” I said. “Then you have to go back inside.” I walked toward the entrance, heard them laughing behind me, I felt such warmth for them, not only for them though, for all the pupils and all the people in the village, in fact, for everyone in the world. It was that kind of day. 

Page 477 the thought made me desperate in the same senseless way that I was sad whenever anyone left a party, as though with every person who left I came a step closer to death or some other calamity.

Page 489 I had never quite found the right tone with Tor Einar. We were the same age and had a lot in common, much more than I and Nils Erik had, but it didn’t help, it was irrelevant. I always played a role when I was with Tor Einar, which wasn’t the case with Nils Erik, and I didn’t like myself when I did, when there was a distance between the person I was and what I said, a kind of delay that allowed space for calculations, as if I wanted to say what he preferred to hear rather than what I had to say or talk about.

A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold, r. Nov. 2024

p. 40 At 3:30 a.m., with such dignity as I can muster of a July morning, I step from my cabin door, bearing in either hand my emblems of sovereignty, a coffee pot and notebook.

p. 112 When I call to mind my earliest impressions, I wonder whether the process ordinarily referred to as growing up is not actually a process of growing down; whether experience, so much touted among adults as the thing children lack, is not actually a progressive dilution of the essentials by the trivialities of living. This much at least is sure: my earliest impressions of wildlife and its pursuit retain a vivid sharpness of form, color, and atmosphere that half a century of professional wildlife experience has failed to obliterate or to improve upon.

p. 138 Man always kills the thing he loves, and so we the pioneers have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map.

p. 150 Some day my marsh, dyked and pumped, will lie forgotten under the wheat, just as today and yesterday will lie forgotten under the years.

p. 166 It is the expansion of transport without a corresponding growth of perception that threatens us with qualitative bankruptcy of the recreational process. Recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind.

p. 171 I have the impression that the American sportsman is puzzled; he doesn't understand what is happening to him. Bigger and better gadgets are good for industry, so why not for outdoor recreation? It has not dawned on him that outdoor recreations are essentially primitive, atavistic; that their value is a contrast-value; that excessive mechanization destroys contrasts by moving the factory to the woods or to the marsh.

p. 177 To sum up, wildlife once fed us and shaped our culture. It still yields us pleasure for leisure hours, but we try to reap that pleasure by modern machinery and thus destroy part of its value. Reaping it by modern mentality would yield not only pleasure, but wisdom as well.

p. 182 Wilderness areas are first of all a series of sanctuaries for the primitive arts of wilderness travel, especially canoeing and packing.

p. 189 Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down, in the last analysis, to a question of intellectual humility. The shallow-minded modern who has lost his rootage in the land assumes that he has already discovered what is important; it is such who prate of empires, political or economic, that will last a thousand years. It is only the scholar who appreciates that all history consists of successive excursions from a single starting-point, to which man returns again and again to organize yet another search for a durable scale of values. It is only the scholar who understands why the raw wilderness gives definition and meaning to the human enterprise.

p. 211 The 'key-log' which must be moved to release the evolutionary process for an ethic is simply this: quit thinking about decent land-use as solely an economic problem. Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.

No One's Home by D.M. Pulley, r. Nov. 2024

p. 46 The plight of all children hung from his awkward shoulders, always being dragged somewhere they’d rather not go by forces beyond their control. Like luggage.

Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake, r. Nov. 2024

 p. 12 His mind, and the minds of his small companions in that leather-walled schoolroom, was far away, but in a world, not of prophets, but of swopped marbles, birds' eggs, wooden daggers, secrets and catapults, midnight feasts, heroes, deadly rivalries and desperate friendships.

p. 76 And then he felt something more thrilling than the warm kiss of the sun on the back of his neck: it was a reedy flight of cold April air across his face – something perilous and horribly exciting – something very shrill, that whistled through his qualmy stomach and down his thighs.

p. 93 It had been a difficult time for [Bellgrove] since he first put on the Zodiac gown of high office. Was he winning or losing his fight for authority? He longed for respect, but he loved indolence also. Time would tell whether the nobility of his august head could become the symbol of his leadership. To tread the corridors of Gormenghast the acknowledged master of staff and pupil alike! He must be wise, stern, yet generous. He must be revered. That was it... revered. But did this mean that he would be involved in extra work...? Surely, at his age...?

p. 96 Bellgrove came to with a start. He looked about him with the melancholy grandeur of a sick lion. Then he found his mouth was open, so he closed it gradually, for he would not have them think that he would hurry himself for anyone.

p. 133 Noon, ripe as thunder and silent as thought, had fled unfingered.

p. 135 'I have no idea,' he said. 'No idea whatsoever, as to what it can be to which you are referring.' His words could not have sounded heavier or less honest. He must have felt this himself, for he added, 'Not an inkling, I assure you.'

p. 148 With the nightmare memory of his recent adventure filling his mind he moved in a trance, waking from time to time to wonder at this new manifestation of life's incalculable strangeness – the little box ahead of him, the sunshine playing over the head of Gormenghast Mountain, where it rose, with unbelievable solidity, ahead, like a challenge, on the skyline.

p. 264 And Titus watching longed with his whole being to be anonymous – to be lost within the core of such a breed – to be able to live and run and fight and laugh and if need be, cry, on his own. For to be one of those wild children would have been to be alone among companions. As the Earl of Gormenghast he could never be alone. He could only be lonely.

p. 269 And every day the myriad happenings. A loosened stone falls from a high tower. A fly drops lifeless from a broken pane. A sparrow twitters in a cave of ivy. The days wear out the months and the months wear out the years, and a flux of moments, like an unquiet tide, eats at the black coast of futurity. And Titus Groan is wading through his boyhood.

p. 405 [Countess Gertrude's] brain began to go to sleep again. She had lost interest in it and the things that it could do. It had been brought forth like a machine from the darkness and set in motion – and it had proved itself to be measured and powerful, like the progress of an army on the march. But it now chose to halt. It chose to sleep again.

p. 407 It was when he saw the great walls looming above him that he began to run. He ran as though to obey an order. And this was so, though he knew nothing of it. He ran in the acknowledgement of a law as old as the laws of his home. The law of flesh and blood. The law of longing. The law of change. The law of youth. The law that separates the generations, that draws the child from his mother, the boy from his father, the youth from both. And it was the law of quest. The law that few obey for lack of valour. The craving of the young for the unknown and all that lies beyond the tenuous skyline.

The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles, r. Nov. 2024

Page 35

I guess some people are like that when it comes to surprises. Me, I love surprises. I love it when life pulls

a rabbit out of a hat. Like when the blue-plate special is turkey and stuffing in the middle of May. But

some people just don’t like being caught off guard—even by good news.

Page 38

Country cooking . . . You hear a lot about it back East. It’s one of those things that people revere even

when they’ve never had any firsthand experience with it. Like justice and Jesus.

Page 103

I do it because it’s old-fashioned. Just because something’s new doesn’t mean it’s better; and often

enough, it means it’s worse. Saying please and thank you is plenty old-fashioned. Getting married and

raising children is old-fashioned. Traditions, the very means by which we come to know who we are, are

nothing if not old-fashioned.

Page 175

it had been in gratitude that by gently coaxing her from her malaise in order to witness this magical

display, he had reminded her of what joy could be, if only she were willing to leave her daily life behind.

Page 201

Emmett was raised to hold no man in disdain. To hold another man in disdain, his father would say,

presumed that you knew so much about his lot, so much about his intentions, about his actions both

public and private that you could rank his character against your own without fear of misjudgment. But

as he watched the one called Parker empty another glass of tepid gin and then draw the olive off the

minute hand with his teeth, Emmett couldn’t help but measure the man and find him wanting.

Page 222

The boy continued to shake his head, though not in a contrary way. He shook his head in the manner of

patience and kinship.

Page 288

On the bed were four cardboard boxes with his name written on them. Woolly paused for a moment to

marvel at the handwriting. For even though his name had been written in letters two inches tall with a

big black marker, you could still tell it was his sister’s handwriting—the very same handwriting that

had been used to write the tiny little numbers on the tiny little rectangle in the telephone dial. Isn’t that

interesting, thought Woolly, that a person’s handwriting is the same no matter how big or small.

Page 406

Well, when circumstances conspire to spoil your carefully laid plans with an unexpected reversal, the

best thing you can do is take credit as quickly as possible.

Page 422

And from all of these pages upon pages, one thing I have learned is that there is just enough variety in

human experience for every single person in a city the size of New York to feel with assurance that their

experience is unique. And this is a wonderful thing. Because to aspire, to fall in love, to stumble as we do

and yet soldier on, at some level we must believe that what we are going through has never been

experienced quite as we have experienced it.

Page 455

—No, no, said Woolly. It’s for you. I took it out of the box because I want you to have it. Shaking his

head, Billy said that such a watch was far too precious to be given away. —But that’s not so, countered

Woolly excitedly. It’s not a watch that’s too precious to be given away. It’s a watch that’s too precious for

keeping. It was handed down from my grandfather to my uncle, who handed it down to me. Now I am

handing it down to you. And one day—many years from now—you can hand it down to someone else.

Perhaps Woolly hadn’t put his point to perfection, but Billy seemed to understand.

Page 463

But maybe, I was thinking as I was driving over the Hudson River, just maybe the will to stay put stems

not from a man’s virtues but from his vices. After all, aren’t gluttony, sloth, and greed all about staying

put? Don’t they amount to sitting deep in a chair where you can eat more, idle more, and want more? In

a way, pride and envy are about staying put too. For just as pride is founded on what you’ve built up

around you, envy is founded on what your neighbor has built across the street. A man’s home may be

his castle, but the moat, it seems to me, is just as good at keeping people in as it is at keeping people out.

Page 477

Emmett could tell that Sally was as ashamed as he was, and there was comfort in that too. Not the

comfort of knowing that someone else was feeling a similar sting of rebuke. Rather, the comfort of

knowing one’s sense of right and wrong was shared by another, and thus was somehow more true.

Page 505

What an extraordinary passage were those first years in Manhattan! When Abacus experienced

firsthand the omnivalent, omnipresent, omnifarious widening that is life. Or rather, that is the first half

of life. When did the change come? When did the outer limits of his world turn their corner and begin

moving inexorably toward their terminal convergence?

Page 506

How easily we forget—we in the business of storytelling—that life was the point all along.

Page 536

Emmett shook his head, uncertain of whether his father’s actions should give him cause for

disappointment or admiration. As usual with such puzzles of the heart, the answer was probably both.

Page 547

He was clearly rattled by it. In all probability, he had never seen a dead body before, certainly not the

body of a friend. So I really couldn’t fault him for throwing some blame my way. That’s what rattled

people do. They point a finger. They point a finger at whoever’s standing closest—and given the nature

of how we congregate, that’s more likely to be friend than foe.