I was wholly invested in my friendships. I might have tested them sometimes, but only to reassure myself that they were permanent. A mistake, of course.

In seventh grade I gradually became aware that that quickness of feeling was something I was supposed to have outgrown. I was rather guileless, I think, or at least I was when it came to the people I cared about.

Who was it who said that every virtue contains its corresponding vice? C.S. Lewis? Virginia Woolf? You forget. But it has always worried you that what the virtue of wit contained was the vice of scorn.

You could not presume that people were healthy. You could not presume that they would welcome the little nudges and jostlings of life. You had to behave as though everyone you met was walking a thin wire far above the earth, where the slightest wind might rock them off their balance and send them tumbling to the ground.

I was also ready to believe, though, that whatever good things I had managed to set upright could topple at any second.

I might not remember how the sky looked on any given day. I do remember, though, what it was like to be a boy beneath a sky.

The books you love best - those are the immensity of the sea.