“He loved me the way only a nineteen-year old can- suddenly and deliriously.”

“Cortez looked like someone newly in love, the way only twenty-four-year-olds can look.”

“We'd been twelve years old together. We'd shared the convictions that only twelve year olds can share, that love is simple and powerful and easy and inevitable.”

“I think it's hard to learn democracy when we make children prisoners until they're nineteen years old.”

“Like the morning you walked out of that old house, when you were eighteen and I was, well, I had just turned nineteen, hadn't I? I was a nineteen-year-old and I was in love with Louis and I was in love with you, and I thought I had never seen anything so beautiful as the sight of you walking out a glass door in the early morning, still sleepy, in your underwear. Isn't it strange?”

“He loved Thelma, Jonathan said, he had never loved anyone but Thelma, he had loved Thelma for nineteen years and would always love her even though Thelma didn't give a rat's ass about him and never had.”