“I'm wearing a diaper. Right now.”

“From diapers on, I felt like there was something not good about me, but it was invisible to everybody but my mother. And whenever she looked at me, she had to let me know that she knew. That was her mission in life.”

“If you're here for four more years or four more weeks, you're here right now. I think when you're somewhere, you ought to be there. It's not about how long you stay in a place, it's about what you do while you're there, and when you go, is that place any better for your having been there?”

“I wasn't sad after my father kissed the streetcar. If anything, it was a relief. Much as I missed him, his dying gave me an excuse to feel the way I already felt. Which was the way I felt right now, under the laundry room fluorescents: hollow, pissed off, wanting to be wherever I wasn't. Until I got there. Then I wanted to be somewhere else.”

“Not doing something crude right off is about as close as a guy like me ever gets to class.”

“Booze has a different effect when you're, like, ten. Its doesn't round out the edges so much as wash you right out of the picture.”

“The part of his mind that considered odds and consequences had shut down entirely, snuffed by the sheer adrenal rush of holding her, falling together into the Impala's sunken upholstery. He took her face in his hands as he kissed her, wanting to just get it right, to stamp the moment, to blunt the thunder of fear pounding in his skull as the rest of him succumbed to a sensation beyond pleasure, a kind of twisted relief that he'd macheted all his moorings, that whatever happened now would happen because he'd said 'Fuck It!' to everything that had rendered him, for more years than he could count, a soul-dead, heart-numbed misfit staggering from pill to pill just to get through the dull risk of his own existence.”