“With me, it was my liver that was out of order. […] I had the symptoms, beyond all mistake, the chief among them being "a general disinclination to work of any kind."What I suffer in that way no tongue can tell. From my earliest infancy I have been a martyr to it. As a boy, the disease hardly ever left me for a day. They did not know, then, that it was my liver. Medical science was in a far less advanced state than now, and they used to put it down to laziness.”

“IF - and this is the greatest of them all - I had the courage to see myself as I reallyam, I would find out what is wrong with me, and correct it, then I might have a chance to profit by my mistakes and learn something from the experience of others,for I know that there is something WRONG with me, or I would now be where I WOULD HAVE BEEN IF I had spent more time analyzing my weaknesses, and less time building alibis to cover them.”

“As soon as I sat down across from her, she ordered me to put the entire contents of my pants pockets on the table. I did as I was told, saying nothing. My reality seemed to have left me and was now wandering around nearby. I hope it can find me, I thought.”

“As I nodded and smiled and umm-hmm'd and oh, my'd my way down the drive, I wondered if boys had any sort of magazine that told them how to attract women and, if so, did it ever tell them to put the girls' interests first?”

“Cal," I whisper into her sleep, "if you go, you know what? You'll break my liver." I want to pretend that it's a joke, that she will wake up and laugh with me, throwing her head back the way she did last night, bit this time the words are true . . . she will break my liver, break my heart, kill everything inside alive inside me.”

“I wonder what kind of person would come out if I ever did erase all my inhibitions at once, what kind of being is bottled up inside me now.”