“Why is it that when you’ve lost someone your thoughts go back to the beginning? The first shy meeting of eyes. The first tentative kiss. The happy times together. He’d heard people say that the mind plays tricks, remembering good over bad or sad. Maybe it was nature’s way of keeping a sane person from going crazy with guilt. Not him. From sunup to sundown he remembered his mistakes. All of them. In vivid Technicolor. On a good day, it felt like a fist shoved down his throat and into his stomach to turn him inside-out like a sock. Nothing looks normal, nothing’s the same, until it can be turned right-side-out again.” ~ Dylan Clark”

“But men and women are different in the way that they feel loved. Men like to be admired for what they do, for their integrity and their accomplishments, whether it’s at work or at the gym or mowing the lawn, because it makes them feel manly. When a woman tells a man that she is proud of him, or she tells him that he did a good job, he’ll about bend over backwards to take care of her and love her.” “But women like attention from men, because it makes them feel feminine and adored. That’s why they’re always fixin’ themselves up, doing their hair, wearing pretty clothes and makeup and jewelry and perfume. It’s all to attract your attention, you know.” (Thelma Jenkins)”

“Why can't I have a normal girlfriend?" he asked the air over his head. "I finally meet someone I like and she turns out to be crazy.”

“Then he kissed her again. When he licked her through the silk, she moaned. Catching the fabric, he tugged it aside and licked her again. “Hot … fuck, yeah, you’re hot.”Hope shuddered and fisted her hands in his hair again. But this time, she tugged him closer, gasping out his name.He smiled against her and then proceeded to do to her what she’d been doing to him from the first time he’d laid eyes on her—driving him out of his fucking mind.”

“Then a calm fell upon him. The gushing began from all sorts of places, all over his body. He heard pleasurable little giggles on the outer edges of his mind, in the dark creases behind his thoughts. He felt good, better than he’d felt in years. As if he were inside a huge embrace. And he felt as if he had finally reached the right place, his home, his motherland.”

“Will you remember this day, Gogol?" his father had asked, turning back to look at him, his hands pressed like earmuffs to either side of his head. "How long do I have to remember it?" Over the rise and fall of the wind, he could hear his father's laughter. He was standing there, waiting for Gogol to catch up, putting out a hand as Gogol drew near. "Try to remember it always," he said once Gogol reached him, leading him slowly back across the breakwater, to where his mother and Sonia stood waiting. "Remember that you and I made this journey, that we went together to a place where there was nowhere left to go.”

“Nobody wants to admit to this, but bad things will keep on happening. Maybe that's beause it's all a chain, and a long time ago someone did the first bad thing, and that led someone else to do another bad thing, and so on.You know, like that game where you whisper a sentence into someone's ear, and that person whispers it to someone else, and it all comes out wrong in the end. But then again, maybe bad things happen because it's the only way we can keep remembering what good is supposed to look like.”