“I was strictly a college-ruled man myself, having no talent for illustration and a microscopic scrawl that made wide-ruled seem roomy. The blank pages were usually the most popular”

“I also feel fairly confident that the original Texaco Salvatore was a good family man, with perhaps a propensity for wearing his wife's panties and betting his kids' college money at the track, but otherwise a solid dude.”

“It's moments like this, when you need someone the most, that your world seems smallest.I'm told there's no going back. So I’m choosing forwardThe exhaustion of living was just too much for me to talk any longerIt still might be a shock. To realize you are just one story walking among millionsWhy is it so much easier to talk to a stranger? Why do we feel we need that disconnect in order to connect?I had done it. I had embraced danger. The experience might have been an epic disaster, but it was still…an experienceWe are reading the story of our lives/ as though we were in it, /as though we had written itLike dogs and lions, small children can sense fear. The slightest flinch, the slightest disinclination, and they will jump atop you and devour youI might have liked to share a dance with you. If I may be so bold to sayIn a field, I am the absence of field. In a crowd, I am the absence of crowd. In a dream, I am the absence of dream. But I don’t want to live as an absence. I move to keep things whole. Because sometimes I feel drunk on positivity. Sometimes I feel amazement at the tangle of words and lives, and I want to be a part of that tangle…It’s only a game if there is an absence of meaning. And we’ve already gone too far for thatYou restore my faith in humanity Do you want to go get coffee or something tomorrow and discuss and analyze the situation at length?Let’s just wander and see what happensIt was rather awkward, insofar as we were both teetering between the possibility of something and the possibility of nothing.Fate has a strange way of making plansI love a man who doesn’t let go of the leash, even when it leads him to ruin”

“I figured being a bed salesman was a job of biblically bad paradox. I mean, here he was, forced to stand for eight or nine hours a day, and the whole time he’s surrounded by beds. And not only that, he’s surrounded by shoppers who see the beds and can’t help but think, Man, I’d love to lie down on that bed for a second. So not only does he have to stop himself from lying down, but he has to stop everyone else from doing it, too. I knew if I were him, I would be desperate for human company.”

“I wanted to like her and I wanted her to like me and that was more want than I had saddled myself with in many a moon.”

“My heart literally aches, that shit is not made up; it hurts for an unexpected, brief time warp of suddenly wanting and longing and believing, but then not having.”

“Because I withered under the glare of an actual invitation, I was a firm believer in preventive prevarication--in other words, lying early in order to free myself later on.”