“I dismissed this course of action, sensing my own reserves of strengths, but I experimented with the idea and took it as far as I could in a game I christened Bus Stop: on summer nights, I would stretch out on the road in front of my house, on hot, grainy asphalt scattered with sharp bits of gravel, and watch and wait for growling motors, the blinding movement of headlights, and I weighed up the pros and cons, what tied me to life like a blood oath, what left me cold, or tired me out; and when the noise grew sharper, more grating, and when the headlights from the first bend in the road began to cut out the sides of the buildings and project a slow, revolving shadow dance on the wall, I always came back to the same conclusion - that I felt something stir inside me, as hazy and phony as a childhood memory, as insistent as a hit song you'd heard so often you couldn't get its bitterness out of your head, something that promised me a better future, only somewhere else. And I would unpeel myself from the road, I'd pick myself up, what was left of me, what could still be of some use, and slowly make my way back to the pink gravel of the sidewalk, just like the one my little retarded friend was standing on this morning as stoic as an abandoned house awaiting demolition.”

“She was the living effigy of everything we will never be and, in every sense of the word, she was the retard that I was and that I wasn't, she was my vanishing, wasted talent, and I was the price society paid so that I could become what she couldn't. And this was exactly what I was trying to love; what this little girl, this girl of wire, made it known she could never be; everthing that had been, or that would be no matter who we were, borne away from each of us.”

“Here, too, I recognized-easily, from firsthand experience, since this kind of thing happened at my age-the heat of the moment, the very instant you knew you should be feeling something but, for various reasons, partly due to inexperience, partly to a desynchronized, muddled teenage constitution, this emotion, however hard you tried to express it, stayed uncomfortably stuck in your heart, only half there and only half felt, just like my love for that girl across the street, the feeling I was trying to coax out of myself the way you might squeeze a toothpaste tube you'd decided to roll from the bottom up but that, distracted, and in a rush, you finally ended up pressing any which way.”

“I didn't like what that word-'childhood'-conjured up, or rather, I didn't like the way most people use it: that presumption of innocence and starry-eyed wonder. The only good thing about childhood is that no one really remembers it, or rather, that's the only thing about it to like: this forgetting. What else could possibly lie beneath that blissful oblivion but shame: a dark knowledge of that terrible badge of weakness, that inescapable servitude (bearable only thanks to the slow revelation that we could inflict cruelty and evil on the weaker kids), a sickening awareness that just about everything there is to understand was beyond us, made even worse by the lies and inaccuracies that adults feel entitled to spread around, deliberately, or because they don't know any better, about themselves or about the nature of reality?”

“I heard a song that nailed it: "And if the day came when I felt a natural emotion / I'd get such a shock I'd probably lie / in the middle of the street and die." When were these so-called natural emotions and why were they worth more than the others? Hadn't I already begun to suspect that with feelings, as with revolutions, the more spontaneous-seeming were actually the outcome of long and involved tactical maneuvers? And if, unfortunately, you had to make do without being 'natural', wasn't it better to act as consciously, as deliberately, and therefore as forcefully as possible? Just because a feeling had been painstakingly pieced together didn't mean it was worthless, nor was it necessarily shallow...”

“But if neither sadness or rage could unite us, I didn't know what could - the more I wanted to identify with her, the more I identified with myself; and the more I tried to understand her, the less, necessarily, I succeeded: the failure of an intelligent mind to grasp feeblemindedness was dark and deep, no less than the failure of a feeble mind to grasp intelligence, because intelligence got its shape by not understanding the thing it could never be.”

“When I left Queen's my future seemed to stretch out before me like a straight road. I thought I could see along it for many a milestone. Now there is a bend in it. I don't know what lies around the bend, but I'm going to believe that the best does.”