“There is a primal reassurance in being touched, in knowing that someone else, someone close to you, wants to be touching you. There is a bone-deep security that goes with the brush of a human hand, a silent, reflex-level affirmation that someone is near, that someone cares.”

“Modern American culture dictated the importance of touching the hand of someone you’ve just met, however counterintuitive it seemed. Why would he want to touch someone he didn’t know?”

“The eighteen years he has lived seem but a moment, a breathing space in the long march of humanity. Already he hears death calling. With all his heart he wants to come close to some other human, touch someone with his hands, be touched by the hand of another.”

“To get to know someone new, you need to touch a lot.”

“This is what it means to be loved... when someone wants to touch you, to be tender...”

“It is because the human spirit knows, deep down, that all lives intersect. That death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed.”