“It is so often surprising, who rescues you at your lowest moments.”

My eyelids are my own private cave, he murmured. That I can go to anytime I want.

It’s a pleasure to dive into Hirshberg’s storytelling skills in American Morons.

Language is the ticket to plot and character, after all, because both are built out of language.

I admired that stride; it was like he folded space in two with it.

This is why everyone who eats a Whopper leaves a little more depressed than they were when they came in. Nobody cooked that burger.

It is all about numbers. It is all about sequence. It’s the mathematical logic of being alive.

That she might not actually know us seemed the humblest thing a mother could admit.

Before she knew it was candles, did she think she’d done it herself? With the amazing turns of her hips.

Mom loved my brother more. Not that she didn’t love me – I felt the wash of her love every day.

But what I kept wondering about is this: that first second when she felt her skirt burning, what did she think?

It was a fleeting statement, one I didn’t think she’d hold on to; after all, she had birthed us alone, diapered and fed us, helped us with homework, kissed and hugged us, poured her love into us.

And the warmth of the music inside her, did she believe, for even one glorious second, that her passion had arrived?

That at the same time of this very intimate act of concentrating so carefully on the details of our mother’s palm and fingertips.

But I loved George in part because he believed me; because if I stood in a cold, plain room and yelled FIRE, he would walk over and ask me why.

To see someone you love, in a bad setting, is one of the great barometers of gratitude.

We’re all getting too smart. Our brains are just getting bigger and bigger, and the world dries up and dies when there’s too much thought and not enough heart.

These guys are really the lowest dogs around, and if people knew the truth about them, they would be held in more contempt than Ben Johnson, the runner, and they’re going to know the truth when I do this book!

Sometimes, the ocean floor is only a stop on the journey. And it is when you are at this lowest point, that you are faced with a choice. You can stay there at the bottom, until you drown. Or you can gather pearls and rise back up—stronger from the swim, and richer from the jewels.

Anything was better than nothing. Half-full was better than empty. Ignorance was the lowest form of humiliation and suffering.

What we call the highest and the lowest in nature are both equally perfect. A willow bush is as beautiful as the human form divine.

Divine love does not weigh down, nor carry his servant captive and enslaved to the lowest depths, but raises him, supports him and magnifies him above all liberty whatsoever.

Not only are the numbers of migrants entering the United States at the lowest levels in a generation, but they are now largely Central American.

I think the highest and lowest points are the important ones. Anything else is just…in between.