“I had found him again, and with him, my world had become completely unwound. It was messy and impulsive, naïve and irrational, and somehow, right again.”

“He had undertaken a little assay at the good fight and found that neither the good nor the fight was left to him . . . he had gone after life again and they had shown him life and made him eat it.”

“Cool. I was hanging out with a lunatic I'd found lurking over a dead person. I had a choice here. I could roll with this and somehow figure out how to get back to my real life, or I could freak out and lose it right here, probably be committed with him, and end up in a loony bin of truly epic Victorian ugliness, never to be seen again.”

“There was something odd for him about not feeling lonely. The very fact that he had ceased to be lonely caused him to fear the possibility of becoming lonely again.”

“I could have had him, but I had monologued. Damn it, I was not going to do that again.”

“I'd been through so much, falling short again and again, and only recently had found a place where who I was, right now, was enough.”