“By the time you're an adult, you're used to seeing your friends disappear into their five-year plans. They drop out to get married, have babies, go to grad school, get divorced. They start a band or enter the penal system. They vanish for years at a time - some come back, some don't. Some of them you wait for and some you let go. Sometimes the only way they come back is in a song.”

“Don't go home with that magic man! I wanted to shake my Walkman, warn the Heart girls to run away. Don't trust him! He might be magic, but he's not very nice! He says he just wants to get high awhile, but he'll get you so high you can't come back down. He'll make you stay inside so long, it hurts your eyes to go out, so you'll spend whole years wasting away in his mansion. You'll lose your sense of time. You'll lose your appetite. When your mama cries on the phone, you won't understand a word she's saying. You'll just tell her, "Try to understand." And Mrs. Wilson isn't falling for that shit. Ann! Nance! Get the hell out of there. One smile from that magic man and you're done. You'll be so fucking magic, you won't be real anymore. He'll even set your lipgloss on fire.”

“The way I pictured it, all this grief would be like a winter night when you're standing outside. You'll warm up once you get used to the cold. Except after you've been out there for awhile, you feel the warmth draining out of you and you realize the opposite is happening; you're getting colder and colder, as the body heat you brought outside with you seeps out of your skin. Instead of getting used to it, you get weaker the longer you endure it.”

“The radio tape puts you right back in the original time and place when you first heard the songs. You arethere, my friend.”

“It's always that one song that gets to you. You can hide, but the song comes to find you.”

“The Replacements made me feel a little less scared, because they made good imaginary friends. They looked like a band that would actually be fun to be in. Some bands just lend themselves to that fantasy, like Lynyrd Skynyrd or Earth, Wind & Fire - they looked like you could just drop in and they wouldn't even notice you were hanging around for at least two albums. Jonathan Richman once said he formed a band because he was lonely. The Replacements were imaginary friends who I could practice on while I was learning to have actual friends.”

“I was helpless in trying to return people's kindness, but also helpless to resist it. Kindness is a scarier force than cruelty, that's for sure. Cruelty isn't that hard to understand. I had no trouble comprehending why the phone company wanted to screw me over; they just wanted to steal some money, it was nothing personal. That's the way of the world. It made me mad, but it didn't make me feel stupid. If anything, it flattered my intelligence. Accepting all that kindness, though, made me feel stupid.Human benevolence is totally unfair. We don't live in a kind or generous world, yet we are kind and generous. We know the universe is out to burn us, and it gets us all the way it got Renee, but we don't burn each other, not always. We are kind people in an unkind world, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens. How do you pretend you don't know about it, after you see it? How do you go back to acting like you don't need it? How do you even the score and walk off a free man? You can't. I found myself forced to let go of all sorts of independence I thought I had, independence I had spent years trying to cultivate. That world was all gone, and now I was a supplicant, dependent on the mercy of other people's psychic hearts.”