“...and I realized that Garrett was right about one thing- I had flipped.Completely.”

“The realization that Garrett actually had a mother kind of disturbed me. But only for about twelve seconds. I rarely held thoughts in my head any longer than twelve seconds. Damn my ADD.”

“I am an idiot for wasting any time thinking about a girl named Garrett who I barely know. Because there is one solid truth about women, and that is this: they never stay.”

“It was like that class at school where the teacher talks about Realization, about how you could realize something big in a commonplace thing. The example he gave--and the liar said it really happened--was that once while drinking orange juice, he'd realized he would be dead someday. He wondered if we, his students, had had similar 'realizations.'Is he kidding? I thought.Once I cashed a paycheck and I realized it wasn't enough.Once I had food poisoning, and realized I was trapped inside my body.”

“I thought about mistakes I had made in the past. I thought about when things went wrong. And I realized it was never an issue of intent, but of intensity. I was a good guy, recall.”

“l have no recollection of just when, or more important, why l set about telling the story of the Siege. l suppose it was because l realized l had the right background - and because no one else, as far as I knew, had ever tried it.”