“A spa?""Yeah, Avalon Spa, you know the place near the mall?""Oh, right. What do you do there?"Again, the nervous glance at the floor, and the small flush of color rising up his neck. "I'm a masseur. Which I know sounds phony as hell, but I'm licensed and everything. Also, my clients are women- the only men at Avalon are the ones on staff. And while I've got nothing against women at all- I'd have no friends in high school if it weren't for women- I find them as sexually attractive as roadkill possum."Roan had to swallow back a laugh. "Don't tell them that.""Oh, God no! I'd never get any tips then.”

“Do you have a driver's license?"He laughed. "That's important?""Oh yeah! I'd kill for a driver's license! Hey, maybe that's what the poem means! I'm going to go berserk and start attacking people because they won't let me drive...""Could be, you never know. But yes, I have a driver's license."I leaned back against the wall, sighing. "Man, that must be so cool.""It ranks right up there with lockers. In fact, sometimes I put my drivers license inside my locker, and it's so cool I worry that the whole thing might explode with the sheer coolness of it all.”

“Oh, Kenneth, Kenneth, believe me - there's nothing I'd rather do! I want like hell to tell you. But I can't. I quite literally can't. Because, don't you see, what I know is what I am? And I can't tell you that. You have to find it out for yourself. I'm like a book you have to read. A book can't read itself to you. It doesn't even know what it's about. I don't know what I'm about.”

“I don't know what to do, and if I did know what to do I wouldn't tell you, because if I had to tell you today then I'd have to tell you tomorrow, and when I'm gone you'd have to get somebody else to tell you.”

“Men do not know what they do not know, and women should not tell them.”

“It is very difficult to know people and I don't think one can ever really know any but one's own countrymen. For men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they are born, the city apartment or the farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives' tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in. It is all these things that have made them what they are, and these are the things that you can't come to know by hearsay, you can only know them if you have lived them.”