“While I did that, my own eyes got wet, not fakely, and I blinked the wetness away because it was not my privilege to be sad. Leonard Brodsky was the one who was hurt, and I was the one who’d hurt him, and it didn’t matter that I hadn’t wanted to hurt him or that I didn’t know how I’d hurt him. It didn’t matter that I knew not what I did to him. It didn’t need a name to be wrong. It didn’t need reasons I could understand. Verbosity is like the iniquity of idolatry.”

“The fly was on my desk, his hose in the candy dust. I cupped my hand and covered him, then brushed him past the edge to see where he’d go. He returned to the dust, as if I hadn’t just demonstrated that I could kill him, as if I hadn’t just shown him right there in the dust.”

“My mind was a jumble, a mixed-up mess of hurt and want, but I didn’t know how to sort out the crazy rush of thoughts, and frankly, I didn’t want to. I was burning for him, so I let my body lead me on.”

“And that is why, when he finally did come across the street, I lit my cigarette with my lighter - not to make him feel like a fool who had fallen for a trick, but rather because he had said, 'you had better luck with matches,' when in fact I had not. It was not the matches that brought him across the street. It was the matches that kept him on the bench.”

“You didn’t hurt me, the situation did. And now that I know why I felt that way, it won’t hurt.”

“I didn’t want to invade hisprivacy; I didn’t want to fight with him; I didn’t want anyone else to ever hurt him. I just wantedhim to be a child forever.” She glanced up, crying harder now. “But you can’t do that, if you’re aparent. Because part of your job is letting them grow up.”

“I told him I didn’t want to hurt him, or anyone else. I just feel that sometimes I am better company only to myself, because of what is happening in my life, than I am or would be to anyone else.”