“I was too scared to talk, but I was more scared to not talk.”

“I hear the noise in his voice, and I hear a boy trying to scare the darkness away. I wish I could hear what happened next, but nothing did.”

“I was totally clueless about social interaction, and completely scared of girls. All I knew was that music was going to make girls fall in love with me.”

“I had no voice to talk with because she was my whole language.”

“It was bewildering and humbling to keep discovering how many brave things people can fail to talk themselves out of doing.”

“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.”

“It started off as a playful fantasy we talked about. Then the fantasy became a plan, the way fantasies sometimes do, and the plan became a future. It didn't hit us as the climax of anything, just the celebration of something that had already happened to us. I guess we hoped the celebration would help us understand what had happened.”