“Maybe tears were something you caught. Like the flu.”

“Words could be like food - they felt like something in your mouth. They tasted like something.”

“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.”

“Talking just adds to the noise pollution in the world. If we were really serious about going green, then maybe we'd all just be quiet.”

“Because he said it as if he was the first human being who'd ever noticed. Maybe that's why so many people trusted him, because he had something in his voice, because he was well-spoken and had learned to modulate his speech-just so-and somehow, with that calm and controlled voice, he managed to rearrange the chaos of the world in such a way as to make it appear as if there really were a plan.”

“And why was it that some guys had tears in them and some had no tears at all? Different boys lived by different rules.”

“I got to thinking that poems were like people. Some people you got right off the bat. Some people you just didn't get--and never would get.”