“I sat thinking. How it was she who'd mentioned love first. How she seemed to be waiting, the door still between us, for me to act. And I imagined that if I reached for her I would find her where she lay waiting in the water, and my fingers would glide over her bare wet skin until every inch of her, every crook and hollow, would become mine. I would vouch for her with my life.”

“There was before her and now there is after her, and that is the difference in my life.”

“I think she and I were talking about how much I adored skateboarding on the computer but how it would never even occur to me to try and step on a skateboard in real life, and then she said, 'Let's play Truth or Dare' and then you fucked her." "Wait, you fucked her? In front of the Colonel?" Takumi cried. "I didn't fuck her.”

“Inaction is not the same thing as patience. It is instead a kind of perpetual waiting room, a sterile holding pen for unlived desire, a negative sanctuary. You wait and wait, but the receptionist is very stern and, somehow, the appointment book always full. To make matters worse, crowded into the adjoining cell like so many desperate immigrants, and separated from you by nothing more than the thin permeable wall of your own fear, are all the anticipated rejections of your life. You would think it might be noisy in there, but you'd be wrong. It is totally silent. There's a small Plexiglas window through which you can study these things, this silence, if you have the inclination and the nerve. And eventually, if you have been a diligent enough student and not wasted your time in dreaming, you come to understand that it is not the rejections that make this a prison, not the defeats, but rather your own grim expectation of defeat; not life but its bodily outline drawn in chalk, where the body should be but isn't, where it once was, this ingrained cowardly pessimism, this relentless betting against love and instinct. This is where the silence comes from.”

“I want to tell this right. I was thirty-eight years old. I had spent my entire adult life reading meanings into other people's stories, finding the figure in the carpet, the order in things. God in the details and no place else.”

“. I wanted to hug her, to hold her and tell her that I would have killed him if he ever hurt her. I wanted to shout at her and tell her I would protect her and help her and always be there for her. In that moment I think I fell in love for the first time. I walked over to her not really comprehending what I was feeling but reaching out to her with compassion. I sat down beside Rae and put my arm around her. She hugged me back and whispered, "Thank you." She stood up and touched my cheek with her fingers and went inside her house. I sat there awhile until the porch-light went off and then walked home, my feet about an inch above the ground.”

“A girl never can predict who might wander into her boudoir during a bubble bath.”