“It was a scary thought. A man could be surrounded by poetry reading and not know it.”

“They stayed, many of them, because staying was easier and less scary than leaving,”

“Which is why we have spouses and children and parents and colleagues and friends, because someone has to know us better than we know ourselves. We need them to tell us. We need them to say, "I know you, Al. You are not the kind of man who.”

“To his surprise he also discovered that it was possible to be good at what you had little interest in, just as it had been possible to be bad at something, whether painting or poetry, that you cared about a great deal.”

“I'm about to fuck up, he thought clearly, and his next thought was, but I don't have to. This was followed closely by a third thought, the last of this familiar sequence, which was, but I'm going to anyway.”

“You've become a clever man.”

“Knowing and knowing what to do about it were two different things.”