“Down inside, of course, I wasn't sure, and yet I had to see her one more time. What I needed, I suppose, was some sort of final confirmation, something to carry with me when she was gone.”

“Linda was nine then, as I was, but we were in love...it had all the shadings and complexities of mature adult love and maybe more, because there were not yet words for it, and because it was not yet fixed to comparisons or chronologies or the ways by which adults measure such things...I just loved her. Even then, at nine years old, I wanted to live inside her body. I wanted to melt into her bones -- that kind of love.”

“Each of us, I suppose needs his illusions. Life after death. A maker of planets. A woman to love, a man to hate. Something sacred. But what a waste.”

“I drank some chocolate milk and then lay down on the sofa in my “living” room, not really sad, just floating; trying to imagine what it was to be dead. Nothing much came to me. I remember closing my eyes and whispering her name, trying to make her come back. As we stared at each other, neither of us moving, I felt some...thing go shut in my heart while something else swung open”

“I have tried, of course, to be faithful to the evidence. Yet evidence is not truth. It is only evident.”

“Even then, at nine years old, I wanted to live inside her body. I wanted to melt into her bones - THAT kind of love.”

“He'd been coiled like a snake for years and the tension had gone slack and when he was ready to spring the spring wasn't there, but it could be recoiled.”