Ben Monopoli

“I have learned, though, that memories aren’t things that have to pile up and overwhelm you. They’re just colors...that shade all the new things you feel.”

“Young people think they are invincible, that nothing bad will ever happen to them, and then something changes: they fall in love. And the world begins to seem a lot more fragile.”

“It's not about who you sleep with, or whether you know about sports or tools or have a pearl-wearing wife or whether commercials make you cry. [...] it's about whether you step up. When something hard comes along. A man steps up. He doesn't dodge it or run away from it or try to push it onto someone else. He steps up. Even if it isn't his responsibility. And that's why there are so many guys and so few men. Because stepping up is hard.”

“I have learned... that memories aren’t things that have to pile up and overwhelm you. They’re just colors... that shade all the new things you feel.”

“For as long as we can remember,” [Griff] said, “I mean literally our whole conscious lives, time has been neatly divided into semesters and years. Each year completely distinguishable and unique. First grade, third grade. We didn’t measure by age, we measured by grade. Like I know I broke my arm in sixth grade but I’d have to do the math to figure out what year that was, or how old I was.”

“The bathroom door opened and Griff emerged in a cloud of steam, the grand entrance of every B-movie alien I’d ever seen. Maybe this wasn’t Griff at all but some interstellar prankster setting me up. Forget about abductions, anal probes and secret alien cookbooks—the real fun was in poking at the Earthlings’ old heartaches.”

“Fiction is true. It doesn’t have to factual to be true.”