You tell a man the truth about himself and, well, they find they have trouble accepting it.

I don't know how much time passes with us just lying there, just feeling that the other is really there, really true, really alive, feeling the safety of him, his weight against mine, the roughness of his fingers touching my face, his warmth and his smell and the dustiness of his clothes, and we barely speak.

Do we hate paradise so much we need to make sure it becomes a trash heap?

It's not the mistakes I made but how I responded to them

That's another thing about Noise. Everything that's ever happened to you just keeps right on talking, for ever and ever.

You love him," he says. Not an asking, just a fact. "I do," I say. Also a fact.

Cept for Ben, who I can’t describe much further without seeming soft and stupid and like a boy, so I won’t, just to say that I never knew my pa, but if you woke up one day and had a choice of picking one from a selecshun, if someone said, here, then, boy, pick who you want, then Ben wouldn’t be the worst choice you could make that morning.