“Your sentimentality softens all the edges, you’re misremembering. Take a moment to recall it as it really was: fucking hell.”

“Two plus three is five, check the email, one plus seven is, check the email, eight, check the email, which comes to a total of, who the hell am I anyway, eighty five. This is how he dismembers his day, in the most painful way, moment by moment. A bigger man would just shoot it, put it out of its misery.”

“People are always breaking through, like in the Doors song 'Break on Through (To the Other Side)'. But I really had. I had broken through twice now, and my feeling about the universe was that it was porous and radical and you could turn it on, you could even fuck around with the universe.”

“All I ever really want to know is how other people are making it through life—where do they put their body, hour by hour, and how do they cope inside of it.”

“We really wanted to know all the unknowable things about each other and how we were the same and how we were different, if we even were, maybe nobody is.”

“Someone is getting excited. Somebody somewhere is shaking with excitement because something tremendous is about to happen to this person. This person has dressed for the occasion. This person has hoped and dreamed and now it is really happening and this person can hardly believe it. But believing is not an issue here, the time for faith and fantasy is over, it is really really happening. It involves stepping forward and bowing. Possibly there is some kneeling, such as when one is knighted. One is almost never knighted. But this person may kneel and receive a tap on each shoulder with a sword. Or, more likely, this person will be in a car or a store or under a vinyl canopy when it happens. Or online or on the phone. It could be an e-mail re: your knighthood. Or a long, laughing, rambling phone message in which every person this person has ever known is talking on a speakerphone and they are all saying, You have passed the test, it was all just a test, we were only kidding, real life is so much better than that. This person is laughing out loud with relief and playing the message back to get the address of the place where every person this person has ever known is waiting to hug this person and bring her into the fold of life. It is really exciting, and it’s not just a dream, it’s real.”

“Did you ever really love her? Not really no. But me? Yes. Even though I have no pizzazz?”