“I could have run after him. I could have asked politely for some clarification. But I didn’t I knew what I preferred, and that was—I didn’t want to know. Rather, I wanted to believe.”

“I felt after I finished Slaughterhouse-Five that I didn’t have to write at all anymore if I didn’t want to. It was the end of some sort of career. I don’t know why, exactly. I suppose that flowers, when they’re through blooming, have some sort of awareness of some purpose having been served. Flowers didn’t ask to be flowers and I didn’t ask to be me. At the end of Slaughterhouse-Five…I had a shutting-off feeling…that I had done what I was supposed to do and everything was OK .”

“Do I dare ask him for what I want,As if I knew it,Could find it on some pageIn some chapterIn some book?”

“While I did that, my own eyes got wet, not fakely, and I blinked the wetness away because it was not my privilege to be sad. Leonard Brodsky was the one who was hurt, and I was the one who’d hurt him, and it didn’t matter that I hadn’t wanted to hurt him or that I didn’t know how I’d hurt him. It didn’t matter that I knew not what I did to him. It didn’t need a name to be wrong. It didn’t need reasons I could understand. Verbosity is like the iniquity of idolatry.”

“I wanted to, um, apologize for earlier. I can't believe I did that. I didn't think it could be real and—” “Didn’t think what could be real?” …Your penguin.”

“Normal girls didn’t want their boobs mauled either, and I wholly believed if they could’ve landed a fist like I could, they would have.”