“Make your plans as fantastic as you like, because 25 years from now they will seem mediocre. You will wonder why you did not make them 50 times as great”

“After all, these were not topics you could discuss with someone else; what was there to say to another person about how it felt? You could concoct things you wanted but in certain moments the light shifted or time slowed – on Sundays in particular, time slowed, and occasionally on Saturday afternoons, if you didn’t have a game – and you saw that it was all really nothing. It was just endlessness and what you got or didn’t get would hardly make a difference, and then what was there? The loathsomely familiar room where you lived, your horrible face and body, and the rebuke of other people, how they were unbothered, how you would seem, if you tried to explain, kind of weird and kind of boring and not even original. Why did their lives proceed so easily? Why was it that you needed to convince them and they needed to be convinced and not the other way around? Not, of course, that you would actually succeed if you tried.”

“I enjoyed making them, and if it's great reverence you're looking for, or earnest expressions of gratitude - well, then you don't work with kids.”

“I couldn’t tell them about Cross, I thought. I couldn’t tell them because Dede liked him and because she wouldn’t believe or understand it, and I couldn’t tell them because I myself was unsure what there was to believe or understand. It wasn’t like he’d kissed me, or made any declarations. What could I claim? For years and years, I felt this way, not just about Cross but about other guys – if they didn’t kiss you, it didn’t mean anything. Their interest in you had been so negligible as, perhaps, to have all been in your head.”

“You see, that's the whole point of being in government. If you don't like something you simply make up a law that makes it illegal.”

“You don't make waves unless there's a reason, and it better be good. Because once you do, that's it. You're a trouble make, and they never think of you any other way.”

“This desperate aversion to seeming like you wanted anything, or worse, to going after it, stayed with me for years after I left Ault.”