“And while his mother's lecture had gone over his seven-year-old head, Pasquale saw now what she meant--how much easier life would be if our intentions and our desires could always be aligned.”

“If I could tell you only one thing about my life it would be this: when I was seven years old the mailman ran over my head.”

“Billy covered his head with his blanket. He always covered his head when his mother came to see him in the mental ward - always got much sicker until she went away. It wasn’t that she was ugly, or had bad breath or a bad personality. She was a perfectly nice, standard-issue, brown-haired, white woman with a high school education.She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone through so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn’t really like life at all.”

“When Chveya was seven years old she had understood perfectly how the world worked. Now she was eight, and there were some questions.”

“Oh God, how did he get to be sixty? How quickly the years had passed! His whole life had passed before he realized it, before he began. He hadn’t lived. What had he done in his life? What had he achieved? Could he measure his happy times? How much? How many? Several days, a few months at best? It was not fair to advance in years without realizing the value of time, not fair that no one drew our attention to the time that was slipping through our fingers by the moment. It was a clever trick: to realize the value of life only just before it ended.”

“In his homilies, this old Jesuit always talked about desire, and how we were connected by our desires. He said the most basic human desire was the desire to be desired by one you desire.”