“...they would have all the same stressors still in place, and they would have no means of lessening them, because, their will, if they had amassed any in their time away, was still weak and always a quick casualty. No match for the horrors of lost chances.”

“Women and men communicate differently, often on entirely different planes. But just as men have failed us, we have failed them. It has been one of our great collective female shortcomings to presume that whatever we do not perceive simply isn't there, or that whatever is not communicated in our language is not intelligible speech.”

“Normal life is nuts. It's a downhill deterioration to death no matter how you spice it along the way, and there's nothing you can do about it. Now, a sane person, when faced when that, would just plunk his ass down at the starting line, or wherever along the way this realization finally came to him, and say, "Are you kidding? I quit. I'll slide the rest of the way or sit here and smoke." It takes a true lunatic, or someone functioning with the critical apparatus of a worker bee, to keep scrabbling up that hill when he knows his destiny is dust. But that us what is required. Go on.”

“There is a time in a boy’s life when the sweetness is pounded out of him; and tenderness, and the ability to show what he feels, is gone.”

“You want to be happy? You want to be well? Then put your boots on.”

“... there is a whole hell of a lot of knowledge about the (expletive removed) human condition that we are not ready for.”

“She waited in the ward thinking what I had thought in the same circumstances, that this was not a place much designated to help people like us, the semi-talented, sometime wayward overachievers who got a little carried away with the X-ACTO knife when we got a bad grade, or otherwise tripped on the latter of betterment.”