“First the fact that the only items on open display seem to be tampons, breast pumps, and douches, making one feel as a female more soiled and wretched than even two thousand years of Catholic catechism could do.”

“Religious moderation springs from the fact that even the least educated person among us simply knows more about certain matters than anyone did two thousand years ago.”

“The idea—the fact of it, the fact that he even noticed and thought about me for more than one second—is huge and overwhelming, makes my legs go tingly and my hands feel numb.”

“Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I'm gazing at a distant star. It's dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago.Maybe the star doesn't even exist any more. Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything.”

“A baseball bat could not have hit me harder than that smile did. I was sixteen years old. In that time, how many thousands of smiles had been aimed at me? so why did this one feel like the first?”

“If love doesn’t triumph, it ought to. For love is the one thing we have that feels more powerful than even death; the only respite from life’s wretched absurdity. The magic of love is not that it contains all the answers, it’s that it eliminates the need for so many pressing questions. For love makes us feel like gods--and that’s what we’re really after, isn’t it?”