If there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame, don't snuff it out, don't be brutal with it. Withdrawal can be a terrible thing when it keeps us awake at night, and watching others forget us sooner than we'd want to be forgotten is no better. We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything - what a waste!

No one starts as a self-hater. But rack up all of your mistakes and take a large enough number of wrong turns in life and soon you stop trying to forgive yourself. Everywhere you look you find shame or failure staring back.

Perhaps we were friends first and lovers second. But then perhaps this is what lovers are.

Most of us can't help but live as though we've got two lives to live, one is the mockup, the other the finished version, and then there are all those versions in between. But there's only one, and before you know it, your heart is worn out, and, as for your body, there comes a point when no one looks at it, much less wants to come near it. Right now there's sorrow. I don't envy the pain. But I envy you the pain. (p. 225)

Many critics speak about coming-of-age love, about initiation, about young libido, and so forth. I've never seen it only this way. We continue to examine things ever so minutely, we interpret obsessively. We may be less bold at 40 than we were at 17, but we're familiar with the road map; we know the bumps in the road; we recognize the sudden turns, the one-way streets, and the dead ends. And we are hurt just the same as when we were teenagers.

Whoever said the soul and the body met in the pineal gland was a fool. It's the asshole, stupid.

And on that evening when we grow older still we'll speak about these two young men as though they were two strangers we met on the train and whom we admire and want to help along. And we'll want to call it envy, because to call it regret would break our hearts.