Gus: "It tastes like..." Me: "Food." Gus: "Yes, precisely. It tastes like food, excellently prepared. But it does not taste, how do I put this delicately...?" Me: "It does not taste like God Himself cooked heaven into a series of five dishes which were then served to you accompanied by several luminous balls of fermented, bubbly plasma while actual and literal flower petals floated down around your canal-side dinner table." Gus: "Nicely phrased." Gus's father: "Our children are weird." My dad: "Nicely phrased."

The whole thing was the precise opposite of what I figured it would be: slow and patient and quiet and neither particularly painful nor particularly ecstatic

there is no best and no worst, ...those judgments have no real meaning because there is only what is

The funny thing about writing is that whether you're doing well or doing it poorly, it looks the exact same. That's actually one of the main ways that writing is different from ballet dancing.

You just gotta tell her, man,’ I said. ‘You just gotta say, “Angela, I really like you, but there’s something you need to know: when we go to my house and hook up, we’ll be watched by the twenty-four hundred eyes of twelve hundred black Santas.

Before any of it could make sense, it had to be heard.

Sunlight feels warm and rough against your skin like a kiss on the cheek from your dad.