“Freshly brainwashed from rehab, I carry the bottle into the bathroom. I hold it up to the light. See the pretty bottle? Isn't it beautiful? Yes, it's beautiful. I unscrew the cap and pour it into the toilet. I flush twice. And then I think, why did I flush twice? The answer, is of course, because I truly do know myself. I cannot be sure I won't attempt to drink from the toilet, like a dog.”

“I sit there and think how it isn't fair that I can't drink at all, even a little. I realize I have crammed an entire lifetime of moderate drinking into a decade of hard-core drinking and that is why. I blew my wad.”

“The year I snuck an interracial lesbian couple into the background of an American Airlines commercial, I was feeling particularly flush.”

“I think…Have I given up anything by living with another person? Has there been a trade-off?Always, there is a trade-off. And the answer comes to me instantly. I have given up a certain degree of freedom. The ability to plow through my life with utter disregard for the thoughts and feelings of other people. I can no longer read a magazine and throw it on the floor.In exchange, I get unlimited access to the one person I have met in my life whom I automatically felt was out of my league. My favorite human being, the single person I cherish above all others. This is the person I get to share the oxygen in the room with .And for this, I will happily scrub the toilet.”

“It is astonishingly satisfying to look at him and think Closet Case, and know he can read my mind as he looks away flushed. All Mormons are gay, I believe. Rick is merely a further example.”

“I could see jabs from his flashlight cutting into the woods on either side of me. He was back there, somewhere. The light beam was like a knife and I didn't want it on my back.”

“What I really want is to sit next to someone on an L.L. bean blanket on the beach in the fall and drink coffee from the same mug. I don't want some rusty '73 Ford Pinto with a factory-defective gas tank that causes it to explode when its rear-ended in the parking lot of the supermarket. So why do I keep looking for Pintos?”