“So-called real life has only once interfered with me, and it had been a far cry from what the words, lines, books had prepared me for. Fate had to do with blind seers, oracles, choruses announcing death, not with panting next to the refrigerator, fumbling with condoms, waiting in a Honda parked round the corner and surreptitious encounters in a Lisbon hotel. Only the written word exists, everything one must do oneself is without form, subject to contingency without rhyme or reason. It takes too long. And if it ends badly the metre isn't right, and there's no way to cross things out.”

“I watched him as he lay there, taking the needle without flinching and knowing that even the relief it brought was temporary, that his end was coming and he could not stop it—and knowing, too, that he was not afraid, and that he would do this the right way, as he had done everything else in his life the right way. And I knew this, too: Harry understood me. No one else ever had, and no one else ever would, through all time in all the world. Only Harry. The only reason I ever thought about being human was to be more like him.”

“For some reason, she didn't want to take the motorcycle, so that left my car, the ever trusty (almost always) Blue Beetle, in old-school VW Bug that had seen me through one nasty scrape after another. More than once, it had been pounded badly, but always it had risen to do battle once more – if by battle one means driving somewhere at a sedate speed, without much acceleration and only middling gas mileage.”

“He was in his chair in the corner, resting a second before he came out for the next round -- in a long line of next rounds. The thing he was fighting, you couldn't whip it for good. All you could do was keep on whipping it, till you couldn't come out anymore and somebody else had to take your place.”

“I get it, Will,” I finally whisper. “I get it. In the first line, when you said that death was the only thing inevitable in life…you emphasized the word death. But when you said it again at the end of the poem, you didn’t emphasize the word death, you emphasized the word life. You put the emphasis on life at the end. I get it, Will. You’re right. She’s not trying to prepare us for her death. She’s trying to prepare us for her life. For what she has left of it.”

“I was in the biggest breakdown of my life when I stopped crying long enough to let the words of my epiphany really sink in. That whore, karma, had finally made her way around, and had just bitch-slapped me right across the face. The realization only made me cry harder.”