“His parenting never involved indulgence, just benign neglect. And having let me do as I wish for two decades, it seems a mean trick to impose discipline by marrying me off to some relic from another age.” “Perhaps.” “Who knows if the old baron is even up to the task of managing me! You say I’ll give him fatal spasms.” “Only if the drink doesn’t kill him first,” Clun quipped. “He’s a… a tippler?” She asked. “More than tipples, if memory serves. A bottomless cask. Mouth like a funnel on one end and a wee spigot at the other,” he concluded with a wink.”

“He gives me a kiss that barely touches my lips – it means nothing or everything. After he’s gone, I think, Happy birthday to me.Jack says, ‘That was the guy?’‘That was him.’Jake shakes his head.‘What?’‘He’s not for you,’ he says.I say, ‘How do you know?’ but what I mean is, How do you know?‘He’s like Ashley Wilkes,’ he says. ‘Any one of these guys is Rhett-ier than he is.’Again, I ask my benignly inflected, ‘How do you know?’‘How do I know?’ he says, tackling me into a bear hug. ‘How do I know? I know, that’s how I know.”

“He was having a bad day. He’s worse than a girl, trust me. He doesn’t hate you. We’re twins. Even I want to kill him on days that end with a Y(...)”

“Our relationship finally ended when he took to waking me up in the wee hours of the morning when he would go surfing. He thought it might be fun to have me come watch. "Fun for who?" I wanted to ask. I had never asked him to come to Happy Hour and watch me drink.”

“The only writers who have any peace are the ones who don't write. And there are some like that. They wallow in a sea of possibilities. To express a thought, you first have to limit it, and that means kill it. Every word I speak robs me of a thousand others, and every line I write means giving up another.”

“If he’ll let me. But he left the hospital without talking to me. I don’t know what that means.”Screw that. “Yes, of course I’ll see him again. Isaiah and I are friends and he’s going to realize that evenif I have to take a two-by-four to him.”