“[...] to you, unknown corporeal interlocutor who I hope is just kind of out there somehow knowing my thoughts and undertaking your own heroic struggle against the exigencies of having a body made of a trillion cells each with a hungry mouth [...]”

“You know what love is because you've studied it, not because you've felt it. You never will. You know what love is? It's this insidious thing that infects your eyes and ears, spreads to every inch of skin, the follicles of hair on the skin, the lips, the tongue, a hundred million microscopic organisms crawling on you. They commandeer the hollow of your thorax and your guts, your arms, your legs, your head, and other extremities. You cease to be yourself. You are now a vessel of impressions and thoughts of the person you love, of wishes for her, of dreams of her. You're jealous of the air she breathes because she takes it inside her all day and needs it to live; it becomes her, as you want to. You cast your thoughts of her and you an hour, a day, a week, a year, a hundred years into the future. No thought has the power to push itself as far into the future as the thought of love—not even thoughts of fame, or wealth, or death.”

“A friend who won't respond to what a friend can't ask is like a looking glass in which you cannot see yourself.”

“I don't want to think anymore. Thinking prevents you from living.”

“Then came that sigh. I wish I had had a tape recorder handy every time in my life that I heard a boy sigh at the outset of urination. What a lovely sound. So much satisfaction. Girls sigh far less often before they pee, and not with the same devotion, I think. If only I had such a recording of boys' sighs. I would lie on a pillow in the sunlight of the late afternoon, sometimes listening to Chopin, sometimes Schubert, and sometimes to the sighs, seriatim, of all the boys about to pee.”

“That they dared make a town of this wet and sucking thing that vied with my foot for my boot at every step bespoke the glorious and yearning bullshit of men's souls.”

“Still the most intense pleasure's but a splinter of ice on the gallons of lava that gush from my cracked heart.”