“It was a weird kind of desperation. We knew frenzied fucking, and we knew covert quickies, but this was something else entirely.”

“I am sure it is everyone’s experience, as it has been mine, that any discovery we make about ourselves or the meaning of life is never, like a scientific discovery, a coming upon something entirely new and unsuspected; it is rather, the coming to conscious recognition of something, which we really knew all the time but, because we were unwilling to formulate it correctly, we did not hitherto know we knew.”

“He died violent and young and desperate, just like we all knew he'd die someday.”

“We cried because we had lost something and gained something else. And because it hurt both losing and gaining. And because we knew what we had lost but weren't as yet able to put into words what it was we had gained.”

“I forced myself to stay put and keep looking - impatient assholes would make a leap, letting adrenaline and desperation guide them, but I was fucking ancient and I knew better. It was bitter, but I fucking knew better about just about everything.”

“There were thousands of households throughout that city and there was something happening in all of them. There was some kind of story in each, but self-contained. No one else knew. No one else cared.”