“Madison answered. “I said, ‘The Queen thinks the King’s a pussy for sending her to retrieve me. I dare him to catch me if he can.”

“I had no more need of God than He had of me, and if there were one, I often said to myself, I would meet Him calmly and spit in His face.”

“Later Achilles would play the lyre, as Chiron and I listened. My mother's lyre. He had brought it with him.'I wish I had known,' I said, the first day when he showed it to me. 'I almost did not come, because I did not want to believe it.'He smiled. 'Now I know how to make you follow me everywhere.”

“You might have thought I’d worry about him, about causing him pain or at least embarrassment. I simply didn’t. I felt the kind of desperation, I think, that cancels the possibility of empathy. That makes you unkind. When I described myself as I was at that time to Daniel, I often said to him, “You wouldn’t have liked me then.”

“He said to me I was a tree in a story about a forest, and that it was arrogant of me to believe any differently. And he told me the story of the forest is better than the story of the tree.”

“Doggone, I never thought I’d lose my mind.” I was startled at the time to realize this – that he had thought about it. But now that he is dead…it’s my turn to think of it – of death – and I do. I wonder how it will come to me. And when I do, I remember this moment; when my father seemed to be getting the news about his fate, about how it would b e for him, when he took it in and accepted it and was, somehow, interested in it, all at the same time, before my eyes. It was a moment as characteristic of him as any I can think of in his life, and as brave. Noble, really, I’ve come to feel.”

“I kept my arms around Joi and my face buried deep in her hair while I waited for Peter Pan to slip through the window. I thought I needed him to tell me what I should do. But he never showed up. He left me alone with a girl who smelled of jasmine and cocoa butter. And before I fell asleep, I finally realized that was more than enough.”