“I guess you don't know what kind of guy you are until you start acting like one.”

“At the time, I thought this was just one of those vague things adults say to remind you that you're a kid who doesn't know what adults know. But it seemed now it was one of those specific things adults say to remind you that you're a kid who doesn't know what adults know.”

“You could have saved her," he said, and I realized that he had started crying, crying being that thing you do when you haven't done enough and you're afraid it's too late to start.”

“And I thought that maybe this was what it means to get old: to have someone much younger remind you of how you weren't the same person you used to be.”

“They [my eyes] immediately started to tear up, tears being your eyes' way of forbidding you to look away,of forcing you to look at the world you've made or unmade. ”

“When we say we know something in our bones, we mean we don't know yet how we know what we know. This is what we mean by "bones.”

“When I was a boy, I would read those postcards and know exactly why my father was doing what he was doing: he was taking a stab at greatness, that is, if greatness is simply another word for doing something different from what you were already doing--or maybe greatness is the thing we want to have so that other people will want to have us, or maybe greatness is merely the grail for our unhappy, striving selves, the thing we think we need but don't and can't get anyway.”