Photo by fromcaliw/love.

1) “Trying to buy a newspaper in D.C. drove me insane…You have to go into a CVS, and then you get taxed on it. You don’t just throw your dollar at the news guy.”
2) “There’s no cheap food here…Here, you get world-class food, but not cheap food.”
3) “You can walk 10 blocks and pass 10 bagel places. There are some bagel places that won’t even toast their bagels. They come out of the oven, and they’re done. There’s institutional integrity.”
4) “Meiwah [is] good Chinese takeout.”
5) “I look back on that time in D.C. as a great reprieve…I complained about things the entire 10 months that I lived there.”

[WaPo; see also Mike Madden and Jeremy Binckes, who decided to spend more effort commenting about Monica Hesse’s piece than the people quoted above have collectively spent on attempts to assimilate into the District.]