“It took years after I’d graduated from Amherst to realize that people were actually far more complicated and interesting than books, that almost everyone else suffered the same secret fears and inadequacies as I, and that feeling alone and inferior was actually the great valent bond between us all. I wish I’d been smart enough to understand that when I was an adolescent.”

“I wish I’d a knowed more people. I would of loved ‘em all. If I’d a knowed more, I would a loved more”

“...five minutes from now, when everything else had dropped away and I realized the full impact of what I’d done, I’d feel my heart breaking.”

“What a twisted, twisted place, I think in retrospect… and yet when it was all happening back then, and for many days after I emerged, I couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps it had actually been the straightest place I’d ever visited.”

“I watched him go, a tower of lean muscle and scar tissue camouflaging more secrets than I’d realized.”

“Not long after the book came out I found myself being driven to a meetingby a professor of electrical engineering in the graduate school I of MIT. He said that after reading the book he realized that his graduate students were using on him, and had used for the ten years and more he had been teaching there, all the evasive strategies I described in the book — mumble, guess-and-look, take a wild guess and see what happens, get the teacher to answer his own questions, etc.But as I later realized, these are the games that all humans play when othersare sitting in judgment on them.”