“How could I have ever been ashamed of loving Dante Quintana?”

“I wanted to tell them that I'd never had a friend, not ever, not a real one. Until Dante. I wanted to tell them that I never knew that people like Dante existed in the world, people who looked at the stars, and knew the mysteries of water, and knew enough to know that birds belonged to the heavens and weren't meant to be shot down from their graceful flights by mean and stupid boys. I wanted to tell them that he had changed my life and that I would never be the same, not ever. And that somehow it felt like it was Dante who had saved my life and not the other way around. I wanted to tell them that he was the first human being aside from my mother who had ever made me want to talk about the things that scared me. I wanted to tell them so many things and yet I didn't have the words. So I just stupidly repeated myself. "Dante's my friend.”

“And it seemed to me that Dante's face was a map of the world. A world without any darkness.Wow, a world without darkness. How beautiful was that?”

“For a few minutes I wished that Dante and I lived in the universe of boys instead of the universe of almost-men.”

“I didn't understand how you could live in a mean world and not have any of that meanness rub off on you. How could a guy live without meanness?”

“Dante and I were the last two boys in America who grew up without television.”

“I was harder than Dante. I think I'd tried to hide that hardness from him because I'd wanted him to like me. But now he knew. That I was hard. And maybe that was okay. Maybe he could like the fact that I was hard just as I liked the fact that he wasn't hard.”