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Your first lesson in the anthropology of male-college kinship groups, Amy said. The world you belong to now is split into three tribes. The frat boys and the jocks, who make up about a third of the population, the grinds, who make up another third, and the pukes, who make up the last third

male-college kinship groups, Amy said. The world you belong to now is split into three tribes. The frat boys and the jocks, who make up about a third of the population, the grinds, who make up another third, and the pukes, who make up the last third. You, dear Archie, I’m glad to say, are a puke. Even though you used to be a jock.

But you love movies so much …
I love watching them, but I’m not sure I’d enjoy making them. It takes too much time to make a movie, and during that time you don’t have any time left over to watch other movies. Do you see what I’m talking about? If the thing I enjoy most is watching movies, then the best job for me would be to watch as many movies as I can.

Paris for the most part, Paris for twenty-two of the thirty-one days they spent in France, with one excursion by train to the north (Normandy and Brittany, with visits to Omaha Beach, Mont Saint-Michel, and Chateaubriand’s family castle in Saint-Malo) and one excursion to the south (Marseille, Arles, Avignon, and Nîmes).

even though Ferguson had not yet turned fifteen, he had accumulated enough memories to know that 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

EVERYONE HAD ALWAYS told Ferguson that life resembled a book, a story that began on page 1 and pushed forward until the hero died on page 204 or 926, but now that the future he had imagined for himself was changing, his understanding of time was changing as well. Time moved both forward and backward, he realized, and because the stories in books could only move forward, the book metaphor made no sense. If anything, life was more akin to the structure of a tabloid newspaper, with big events such as the outbreak of a war or a gangland killing on the front page and less important news on the pages that followed, but the back page bore a headline as well, the day’s top story from the trivial but compelling world of sports, and the sports articles were nearly always read backward as you turned the pages from left to right instead of from right to left as you did with the articles in the front, going in reverse as if plowing through a text in Hebrew or Japanese, steadily working your way toward the middle of the paper, and once you hit the no-man’s-land of the classifieds, which were not worth reading unless you were in the market for trombone lessons or a used bicycle, you would jump over those pages until you wound up in the central territory of movie ads, theater reviews, Ann Landers’s advice column, and the editorials, from which point, if you had started reading from the back (as Ferguson, the sports enthusiast, usually did) you could keep going all the way to the front

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

He couldn’t tell if that was a good feeling or a bad feeling — or simply a new feeling.

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

Out of little acorns do mighty oaks grow.