“There is no absolute beginning to any story, after all. There is only the moment you begin watching.”

“It was as if there was a place called After, and if I could just push my family across to that shore, then everything would be all right. There would be time for all these "soft" problems in the land of After.”

“Every father knows the disconcerting when you see your child as a weird, distorted double of yourself. It is as if for a moment your identities overlap. You see an idea, a conception of your boyish inner self...made real and flesh.He is you restarted, rewound; at the same time he is as foreign and unknowable as any other person.”

“The leopard in the zoo wanders to the edge of his pen and, through the bars or across an unjumpable moat, he stares at you with contempt for your inferiority, for needing that barrier between you. There is a shared understanding in that moment, nonverbal but no less real: the leopard is predator and you are prey, and it is only the barrier that permits us humans to feel superior and secure. That feeling, standing at the leopard’s cage, is edged with shame, at the animal’s superior strength, at his hauteur, his low estimation of you.”

“This is the best thing about men's friendships: most any awkwardness can be ignored by mutual agreement and, true connection being unimaginable, you can get on with the easier business of parallel living.”

“Damage hardens us all. It will harden you too, when it finds you—and it will find you”

“All they got locked up in this hole is my body. That's all they got, my body, not me. I'm everywhere, see? Everywhere you look, junior, everywhere you go.”