“The deadweight of his body,coupled with the aches, made him remember back to a time when he'd gotten colds or flus. Same feeling. Was it possible he was getting sick?Made him wonder if anyone had come up with a product like Dead-quil or some shit.Probably not.”

“Marc had grown up, gotten away from the partying lifestyle that made him feel as if his mere presence was a gift to those around him and knew himself for what he'd truly been back then. A fool. Hopelessly in love with a friend who'd never wanted more from him than he'd already given. This weekend, Marc hoped to change that.”

“Reggie made him feel like he was nine years old and out for dinner with his family at the Ponderosa Steak House and he had run into his French teacher and his mother invited her to dine with him.Reggie made him feel like he was sitting in a public bathroom stall and someone had come into the bathroom and began singing a song about what a stinky bastard he was while he was in there sweating it out.Reggie made him feel like someone had taken the red Tonka fire engine he had always wanted and painfully corkscrewed it down the front of his jeans.Reggie made him feel like the ice cream man had just rolled by and all his dead grandparents were mooning him out the truck window.”

“His own voice was older than he was. Ancient, unearthed from some mystical subterranean place...The voice seemed to make his whole body ache. Maybe it made him bleed inside. I wondered if it hurt, if it burned in his throat.”

“See? This was how he’d gotten me to fall in love with him. At times like this he made me feel like the most treasured woman in the world. “So you don’t remember doing this to me? Naked? In the shower? On the bed? On the floor?” With Matt Damon? Okay, how had the Sarah Silverman video gotten in myhead, now of all times?”

“There was no back home any more, not in the essential way, and that was part of Paris too. Why we couldn't stop drinking or talking or kissing the wrong people no matter what it ruined. Some of us had looked into the faces of the dead and tried not to remember anything in particular. Ernest was one of these. He often said he'd died in the war, just for a moment; that his soul had left his body like a silk handkerchief, slipping out and levitating over his chest. It had returned without being called back, and I often wondered if writing for him was a way of knowing his soul was there after all, back in its place. Of saying to himself, if not to anyone else, that he had seen what he'd seen and felt those terrible things and lived anyway. That he had died but wasn't dead any more.”