“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.”

“I could never be what she wanted. She thought I was like Cage and the right girl could tame me. It wasn't about that. I didn't need taming. I needed fucking saving.”

“She repeated what her mother had told me, that she had been moved when she heard me playing as she passed the house. She had seen me on the street a few times, too, and begun to worship me. She actually used that word: worship. It made me turn bright red. I mean, to be 'worshiped' by such a beautiful little doll of a girl! I don't think it was an absolute lie, though. I was in my thirties already, of course, and I could never be as beautiful and bright as she was, and I had no special talent, but I must have had something that drew her to me, something that was missing in her, I would guess. Which must have been what got her interested in my to begin with. I believe that now, looking back. And I'm not boasting.”

“She wasn't certain of exactly what they had together; she doubted Owen knew, either; but whatever it was, she desperately wanted to hold on to it. They were only at the beginning of what they could become together; if she could help it, she would do anything that she could to keep it from ending.”

“I felt sorry for Mary-Emma and all she was going through, every day waking up to something new. Though maybe that was what childhood was. But I couldn't quite recall that being the case for me. And perhaps she would grow up with a sense that incompetence was all around here, and it was entirely possible I would be instrumental in that. She would grow up with love, but no sense that the people who loved her knew what they were doing - the opposite of my childhood - and so she would become suspicious of people, suspicious of love and the worth of it. Which in the end, well, would be a lot like me. So perhaps it didn't matter what happened to you as a girl: you ended up the same.”

“It may just be a little sentence from the little girl, but what matters is that she had done it; why can't I?”