“High School: Oh, man. This is where boys and girls go from tweens to teens and become complicated and cruel. Girls play sick mind games; boys try to pull each other's penises off and throw them in the bushes. If you can, buy the most expensive jeans in a two-hundred-mile radius of your town and wear them on your first day. If anyone asks how you could afford them say that your father is the president of Ashton Kutcher. When they are like, 'Ashton Kutcher has a president?' answer, 'Yes.' Everyone will be in awe of you and you won't have to go through a lot of pain and cat fights.”

“... Brandon's going to talk to a B-O-Y, and -""What?""That's your assignment tonight. You converse in public with a boy. You've heard of them, right? They're like girls, but with penises?”

“She's on his mind again. Her mind is on the boy that smiled at her today. That boy's mind is on another girl. The other girl has her mind on her ex. Her ex is thinking of the girl at the bar. The girl at the bar is thinking of her high school sweetheart. Just as your mind is always on someone, someone's mind is always is on you. What is love but when two minds are thinking of each other.”

“When you’re the father of a little boy, which involves many joys, you do have one rationalization in your back pocket that is ready to be used roughly half of the time – that your little boy has the disadvantage of not being a girl. Girls just seem to be ahead of the game in so many ways when they are little; they are not as apt to tumble spontaneously off stools as boys are. We saw this clearly illustrated the first day we took Dean to nursery school: the little girls took off their coats and hung them up, neatly, and then went to help all the little boys, whose coats were half off, or still zippered and hopelessly tangled around their midsections, or attached to one hand and dragging along the floor.”

“When your mother and your father are having a fight, do you want them to kill each other? Or do you just want them to stop fighting?”

“I know that big people don't like questions from children. They can ask all the questions they like, How's school? Are you a good boy? Did you say your prayers? but if you ask them did they say their prayers you might be hit on the head.”