“Today was the first day of the rest of my life. It was okay, I think the second day of the rest of my life will be better”

“By late August, I’m on my second sublet, and I’ve been working as a copywriter long enough to know I’m not good at it. I seem to be reliving the life I had when I was twenty-two, but I’m about to run twenty-eight, which feels like the opposite of twenty-two.”

“You did the best you could," and she seemed to believe I had.I said, "I've just been going through the motions," using the expression my father had after he'd watched my first tennis lesson."Sweetie," she said, "that's what a lot of life is.”

“I want him to tell my why, but he doesn't say anything. It seems possible that Matthew is gay and possible that he isn't; possible that he is just a little more afraid than the rest of us and possible that he is much more; it even seems possible that what he has with Dena is bigger or deeper or more important than anything else is to him. I don't know, But i no longer believe, as I did that last afternoon at the lake, that my many, many flaws are what prevented Matthew from wanting a life with me. It seems more likely that it is his flaw that he can't or won't love anyone-- and that he is indiscriminate in his unlove.”

“I said, "What's your goal in life?" and winced at how corny and earnest I sounded.He looked away. He thought. "I guess I'm trying to become a better man than the one I'm hardwired to be.”

“I said, "It's not like that." I wanted to convince her. I said "We think alike." Oh, my dear," she said. "A man thinks with his dick.”

“It reminded me of how I’d felt applying to college. Night after night, I sat with my father in his study while he read aloud from Baron’s. He’d read the name of the college, the number of men and the number of women, and a description in guidebook prose; then he’d say, ‘How does that sound?’ and I’d think, Sounds just like the last one.It took me a few nights to realize that my father was reading only the colleges that I had some chance of getting into – not Brown but Bowling Green; not Wesleyan but Ohio Wesleyan; not Williams or Smith, but William Smith. Until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to me that my grades and test scores over the years were anything more than individual humiliations; I hadn’t realized that one day all of them would add up and count against me.”