“The restaurant, Bongiorno's, was bad and didn't know it. Everything was presented with a passive-aggressive flourish, as though we probably weren't savvy enough to appreciate the oregano-heavy garlic bread, the individual bowls for olive pits, the starched napkins stuffed into our wineglasses, or the waiter's strained enunciation of a long list of specials.”

“My heart, to put it more simply, got nostalgic for the present. Always a bad sign.”

“But we were chumps and we knew it. As makers of sentences we were practically fetal, beneath notice, unlaunched, fooling around in our spare time or on somebody else’s dime. Nobody loved our sentences as we loved them, and so they congealed or grew sour on our tongues.We barely glanced at our wall-scribblings for fear of what a few weeks or even hours might expose in our infatuations. Our photocopied fortune slips we’d find in muddy clogs in storm drains, tangled with advertising flyers, unheeded.Our manuscripts? Those were unspeakable secrets, kept not only from the world but from each other.My pages were shameful, occluded everywhere with xxxxxx’s of regret. I scurried to read Clea’s manuscript every time she left the apartment but never confessed that I even knew it existed.Her title was “Those Young Rangers Thought Love Was a Scandal Like a Bald White Head.” Mine was “I Heard the Laughter of the Sidemen from Behind Their Instruments.”

“Dylan never met anyone who wasn't about to change immediately into someone else. His was a special talent for encountering persons about to shed one identity or disguise for another.”

“The cars rushing below knew nothing. People in cars weren't New Yorkers anyway, they'd suffered some basic misunderstanding. The two boys on the walkway, apparently standing still they were moving faster than the cars. Nineteen seventy-five.”

“Those promises we make to ourselves when we are younger, about how we mean to conduct our adult lives, can it be true we break every last one of them? All except for one, I suppose: the promise to judge ourselves by those standards, the promise to remember the child who would be so appalled by compromise, the child who would find jadedness wicked.”

“Enough of this. Does every conversation with you have to be the director's cut? Get out of the car.”