“What was he like afterwards?Totally adorable-he fell asleep right on top of me!What was he like afterwards?I thought he'd died. No, Really! He fell asleep-I had to roll him off of me so i could breathe”

“Tell me something good about your life," I whispered, needing to hear that he wasn't as broken as I thought him to be.Peter breathed into the handset for about two minutes. I began wondering if he was about to hang up, or had fallen asleep, when he answered. "You." It was so quiet I almost didn't hear it. And then he hung up before I could ask him to repeat himself.I fell asleep, grinning, with the phone still clutched in my hand and my milk souring on the coffee table.”

“I remembered going to confession to a great priest, Father Moriarty of South William Street. I told him, "I shot a man, Father." "Did you think you were doing right? Had you no qualms about it?" he asked me. I told him I didn't have any qualms, I thought I was doing right, and he said, "Carry on with the good work," and gave me absolution.”

“Though he’d treated me like crap, I fell asleep thinking of how his bottom lip was slightly plumper than the top—perfect for kissing—and how those onyx eyes glittered when he first glanced at me. I knew he wouldn’t be there in the morning, but I still hoped that I’d see him again.”

“Great teachers had great personalities and that the greatest teachers had outrageous personalities. I did not like decorum or rectitude in a classroom; I preferred a highly oxygenated atmosphere, a climate of intemperance, rhetoric, and feverish melodrama. And I wanted my teachers to make me smart. A great teacher is my adversary, my conqueror, commissioned to chastise me. He leaves me tame and grateful for the new language he has purloined from other kings whose granaries are filled and whose libraries are famous. He tells me that teaching is the art of theft: of knowing what to steal and from whom. Bad teachers do not touch me; the great ones never leave me. They ride with me during all my days, and I pass on to others what they have imparted to me. I exchange their handy gifts with strangers on trains, and I pretend the gifts are mine. I steal from the great teachers. And the truly wonderful thing about them is they would applaud my theft, laugh at the thought of it, realizing they had taught me their larcenous skills well.”

“The Magus must had eyes like a thief because he told Pol to stop and dismount to walk alongside me, one hand resting just above my knee ready to shake me if I fell asleep. He shook hard and resorted to pinching periodically.”

“The narrator analyzes that the maturing, passing away boy within him, "had issued me a challenge as he passed the baton to the man in me: He had challenged me to have the courage to become a gentle, harmless man.”