“I didn’t write that song to try and win you over, or to steal you away from him. I wrote it because I knew I never could.”

“It was all I could do not to fall on my knees and weep like the bastard she always said I was, and I was a breath away from begging her to run away with me.”

“I'd be a sucker for a guy who wrote me a song,” I said. “Like Beth or Rosanna or Sara. Or Sharona. Is that too much to ask? To be somebody's Sharona?”

“The music defied classification. If I had been writing areview of the show, I would have labeled it progressive,guitar-driven rock ’n’ roll. But the guitars made sounds guitarsdidn’t always make. Symphonic sounds. Sacred sounds.The music dug in so deep you didn’t hear it so much as feelit, reminding me of a dream I used to have when I was a kid,where I would be standing on a street corner, I would jumpinto the air, flap my arms, and soar up into the sky.That’s the only way I could describe the music.It was the sonic equivalent of flight.”

“It sounds silly, I know. But for me, the power of music rests in its ability to reach inside and touch the places where the deepest cuts lie.Like a benevolent god, a good song will never let you down.And sometimes, when you're trying to find your way, one of those gods actually shows up and gives you directions.”

“He was waiting for something from me. Acknowledgement. Validation. Commiseration, perhaps. I couldn’t even look at him because I was afraid of feeling any more than I already did.”

“I imagined the towns were filled with people like me - lonely people who wanted to fly away, who wanted more from life than a dreary existence of one-stop shopping, but either didn’t know what that meant, or didn’t have the guts to go out and find it.”