“Mostly I couldn't bear... the paltry notion that memory was all that eternal life really meant, and I spent too much time wondering where people got the fortitude or delusion to keep on moving past the static dead.”

“They worried that I spent too much time alone, clinging to the notion that socializing was therapeutic. So was electroshock, I reminded them.”

“In the modern view, the pitched roof was itself a “dead concept,” but equally unhealthywere all those other dead concepts that got stored underneath the gable, in the attic. For there is where the ghosts of our past reside: the bric-abracand mementos that a lifetime collects; the love letters, photographs, and memories that clutter an attic and threaten to bear us back in time.”

“Love is the emblem of eternity: it confounds all notion of time: effaces all memory of a beginning, all fear of an end.”

“I like people too much or not at all. I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.”

“I spent so much time carefully packing up my past. Sealing it shut. Storing it away. Seeing Brandon makes that box fall open and all the memories spill out at my feet.”