“It still stung, knowing that he would rather see me with someone else than give me my moment, but I had to be mature about it. It wasn't about me.”

“It was knowing someone else thought about me for more than one second, maybe thought about me when I wasn't there.”

“He did not know the truth of me, yet he had perceived something true about me that no one else had ever noticed. And in spite of that—or perhaps because of it—he believed me good, believed me worth taking seriously, and his belief, for one vertigi-nous moment, made me want to be better than I was.”

“God wasn't giving me a megaphone. He was telling me to shut up. To be still and know.”

“Still the fact remains, he had me hooked. As he had, of course, from the beginning. I had been writing my book about Johnno from the moment we met.”

“I don’t know if it was just me making things up in my head but after the fear in their eyes had gone what replaced it was like a sad kind of wondering. A wondering of where the old me was hiding. A wondering about where the old me had gone to. It was like I had suddenly been taken over by someone else and they could see the old me had fallen away for good.”