“Keep an eye on that boy... he has potential”

“Each difficult moment has the potential to open my eyes and open my heart.”

“You and your ‘potential’,” I lazily rolled my eyes. “According to you, everyone has it…and no one is living up to it.”

“Did someone actually have to do bad things to be a bad boy, or was it all about the potential? If it was the potential that counted, then maybe it was the restraint that was so sexy, knowing that he could do something dangerous and powerful but had the restraint not to.”

“Peter loves to make promises. He has the best intentions of keeping them. It makes it worse, somehow, that he doesn’t know how to. He thinks he’s a nice boy, that’s the worst part.”

“In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.”