“A baseball bat could not have hit me harder than that smile did. I was sixteen years old. In that time, how many thousands of smiles had been aimed at me? so why did this one feel like the first?”

“Next time you want to hit mehit me with a baseball bat or a crowbar!”

“It took me seventeen years to get three thousand hits in baseball. It took one afternoon on the golf course.”

“It was the first smile of my life. Of course, that is a ridiculous thing to say; I had been smiled at often, the big man had smiled at me not a minute since. And yet I say: it was the first smile, because it was the first that ever went straight into me like a needle too thin to be seen.”

“And he was the reason I felt it. His gaze, his touch, his smile, his laugh, no one had ever made me feel... worshiped... quite like he did.”

“Why did you hit him? (Grace)Because it gave me a great deal of pleasure. (Julian)Nice. You haven’t seen me in what, two thousand years? So, instead of a friendly, brotherly hug, I get slugged. (Eros)”