“No patience. No kisses. No hugs. Just a tweezers and some rubbing alcohol, and a stinging sensation that never goes away.”

“I get the urge to feel it, too, so when she takes her hand away, I turn her toward me and I feel the edges of New Jersey. I kiss Hoboken and Atlantic City. I kiss Newark and Trenton. I kiss Camden, and then I follow the road west, over the Walt Whitman Bridge into Pennsylvania. And I kiss home.”

“Tell that guy to kiss my white vivacious ass. He never met me.”

“But that's a side effect of alcohol, isn't it? Stopping to think about other people is not on the bar menu.”

“I place us where we are a happy couple who are madly in love, and we are kissing the way people kiss on their wedding day. With joy and relief and love. Without guilt. Without Shame.”

“I want my life to be easier than this. I mean, I know I'm not some starving kid who has to wash clothes in the Ganges for a nickel, but today just sucks.”

“I never asked her how she was, because I didn't really think about how she was. I just thought about what she thought of me.”