What's stronger-the need to uphold the law, or the motive to turn one's back on it?

The process of growing up was nothing more than figuring out what doors hadn't yet been slammed in your face.

You know what I noticed when I was with Jacob? In your world, people can reach each other in an instant. There's the telephone, and the fax - and on the computer you can talk to someone all the way around the world. You've got people telling their secrets on TV talk shows, and magazines that publish pictures of movie stars trying to hide their homes. All those connections, but everyone there seems so lonely.

How do you walk into someone's life again after twenty-eight years? How do you pick up, when you were too young to know where you left off.

It was always easier for me to show love than to say it. The word reminded me of pralines: small, precious, almost unbearable sweet. I would light up in his presence; I felt like a sun in the constellation of his embrace. But trying to put what I felt for him into words diminished it somehow, like pinning a butterfly under glass, or videotaping a comet.

What we all want, really, is to be loved. That craving drives our worst behavior.

Anger, though, is too fierce a flame to last for long, and when it burned out, I was left numb and wondering.