ONE MORE THING - B.J. NOVAK

One More Thing - Pg 276 : Acknowledgments

   Years ago, I shared a lunch with the actor John Stamos. While we did not discuss any aspect of this book, I felt that it would be fun to include his name as a surprise for anyone casually scanning this section for names of celebrities. 

***Bloggers note: It should be known, I was doing exactly that when I read this sentence. - Penelope

One More Thing - Pg 268 : J. C. Audetat, Translator of Don Quixote

   He knew he wasn't a poet anymore. Still, while he didn't know exactly what he wanted to say, he knew exactly how it should sound. He knew the acoustics of his age, he knew the precise echo that greatness made within it, and now, as much as he loved--finally--everything in his life, all he wanted was to hear that sound. He needed that sound to pull him out of where he was now, not because he didn't love where he was now, but because he did, so much, that he needed to find out if he could make a sound that could compete with it.

One More Thing - Pg 267 : J. C. Audetat, Translator of Don Quixote

   He had chosen both Tennessee and Aurelia in large part for the sounds of their names, and his lifelong trust in the poetic had not led him astray; his life was soaked in brunette tones and accidental music, and he was, for the most part, a happy person.

One More Thing - Pg 241 : The Man Who Told Us About Inflatable Women

   "Why do I prefer inflatable women?" asked the old man with a torn-throat chuckle, as if surprised, yet in a way not surprised, to have posed himself this question. "Why do I prefer inflatable women?" he asked again, this time with a shake of his head, as though he just couldn't help being charmed by himself, despite his better wisdom, despite knowing himself all too well.

One More Thing - Pg 230 : Never Fall in Love

   But she did fall in love, almost immediately. Within a month, she was hopelessly and endlessly in love with another secret agent, a kind, warm man named Bob. He had big hands and a lot of brothers and sisters, and there was no falling out of love with Bob.

One More Thing - Pg 223 : "Everyone Was Singing the Same Song"

   He traveled by train among the optimistic and neatly dressed middle classes to San Francisco, a city so light in every way that he couldn't quite believe his eyes. This must be what gave them the idea for Technicolor.

One More Thing - Pg 215 : The Best Thing in the World Awards

   Neil Patrick Harris stared straight ahead, pale and determined, looking both intensely focused and intensely disoriented at once, as if a pair of hands had reached inside him, shook him by something as deep and untraceable as integrity itself, and then placed him back exactly where he had stood, the same but forever different.

One More Thing - Pg 167 : A Good Problem to Have

   He walked to the door and put his hand on the doorknob, and we all waited for him to turn it, but he left it there for a very long time.
   It's very suspenseful for someone to put a hand on a doorknob but not turn it, especially if he's old.

One More Thing - Pg 124 : Kellogg's

   I had, two years earlier, toward the beginning of third grade, realized in an epiphany over an inspiringly decadent breakfast-for-dinner that midnight was not actually the middle of the night: if the night was something that started at 8:00 p.m. and ended at 7:00 a.m., as I knew it to be, then the middle of the night was actually 1:30 a.m. My parents happily confirmed this for me. Although my bedtimes had shifted in the years since, I still believed with stubborn auto-loyalty that 1:30 remained the official unofficial middle of the night.

One More Thing - Pg 109 : The Beautiful Girl in the Bookstore

   In the end, this one wasn't for her. She waited until a morning fog of dishonesty settled over them one day, and she disappeared into it. She loved him, but she never quite got over the suspicion that she was just his favorite thing in the bookstore.

One More Thing - Pg 84 : Sophia

   I laughed, to try to make her laugh, and said that she had said that she had only one more thing to say.
   "Yes!" she said. "That's what I was trying to say before! There's always going to be one more thing. Because that's what infinite feels like. And the difference between love and everything else is that it's infinite, it's built out of something infinite, or it feels like it is, anyway, which is the same thing to us. Or to you, and to simulations like me--I know what I am. But you can't see it, because to you everything is infinite. You think a million billion more things will come your way, a million billion more versions of everything. But no, everything that actually causes that infinite feeling, the circumstances of every infinite feeling, is so, so finite. And I know you can feel this. I mean, if I can, you can!" She laughed, desperately. "If I can? Come on! I'm a robot! If I can feel this, you can feel this! You can feel this."

One More Thing - Pg 80 : Sophia

   And on the opposite side of the table is me.
   The guy who bought the first robot capable of love and handed it back. The guy who came across the greatest discovery in the history of science--and returned it, because his sex robot was crying.
   Did I get what was so funny about it? Of course.
   Did it hurt? Of course.

One More Thing - Pg 71 : Sophia

   "What's the harm?" they would ask me, truly surprised. The harm, besides those hours that actually do matter when you barely have one night off every couple of weeks, is the little mark you get on you every time you open up a door to a hope and then close it fast in disappointment. It leaves a nick, or a dent, and those nicks and dents are not invisible. I used to see them all the time.

One More Thing - Pg 70 : Sophia

   In the meantime... I am also a living person, and, to put a simple desire in simple terms, I want to have sex with attractive people from time to time. Is it a shallow road compared with the road for love? Yes. Of course. But it isn't the road away from love, either; in my case, I think of it as one of those little parallel access roads that you have to travel on sometimes to get where you're going, always in view of the main route.

One More Thing - Pg 69 : Sophia

   A small child, about four years old, is crying because she has drawn all over the wall with her crayons and has just realized that what she has done is going to subject her to some unknown form of justice. I put on a serious face and explain to the child that her mother and I are going to discuss what her punishment should be. Then I close the door to another room, and with relief, I drop the serious face and laugh and kiss the young artist's mother and ask her what in the world we should do about this creature we made who wanted to put colors on the walls and is scared what we're going to say about it.

One More Thing - Pg 68 : Sophia

   I am one hundred percent aware that the moment at which an artificially intelligent creation first independently developed the capacity to feel love is one of the pinnacle moments in the history of history itself, and I stand with the rest of the world in awe of its limitless implications for science, for philosophy, for love, for our species; conception of itself; for our species itself; and for conception itself.
   It simply was not what I had in mind when I purchased a sex robot.

One More Thing - Pg 66 : I Never Want to Walk on the Moon

   When you think about how the moon is a celestial phenomenon that has dominated the nights of humans since before humans were even humans, a place so foreign to our understanding that, until recently in the history of our species, people didn't even think of it as a place, or even as an object, but as an abstraction tied to God; a place that is still, even now that we do understand it, so alien to our everyday thinking that it is never included on any of our maps or globes and can only be reached by a dangerous voyage across hundreds of thousands of miles of literal, actual nothingness; and to know that you have been there and stood on that rock/God/place, with your own two feet, and kicked the dust and moved it a little, and come back home, with the story to tell.... And then, no matter where you are in life, to be able to always look down at those ten little toes that carry you through your house or the hallways of your job or around the same walking path you've been walking for years that you still love in a way even though, somehow, at some point, its loveliness lost its dust of luster in your eyes--to know that no matter where you are, no matter how dull the favorite colors of your life become, you can always look down at those ten little toes and think about how they have been with you to a place that almost no one alive can imagine, and no one dead could have conceived of. And then someday, when you're about to die yourself, and you're scared, at least you know you've already been somewhere mysterious.
   That's honestly all I can come up with, pro-moon-wise. To each his own, I suppose.

One More Thing - Pg 57 : Walking on Eggshells (or: When I Loved Tony Robbins)

   I told him I stopped because I realized I was turning love into an accomplishment, and he was turning accomplishment into love, and neither of those things would ever quite be the other. When I told him that, he seemed to both light up and flare out at the same time--like he knew this was the truth, but that it was also hard for him to let go of someone who would say something like that.

One More Thing - Pg 30 : Julie and the Warlord

   "That does not sound legal," said Julie, trying to stall for time so that she could object properly and intelligently, which was going to take a second, because she had had a couple of drinks already and had not anticipated having to debate a hot-button topic like this at the top of her intelligence--especially not with someone who did it for a living.