A man can go along obeying all the rules and then it don't matter a damn anymore.

There's literary creation and literary business. When I first got something accepted, it gave my life a validation it didn't otherwise have.

This is awful. I don't know what's going to happen to me or to anyone else in the world.

Mel thought real love was nothing less than spiritual love. He'd said he'd spent five years in a seminary before quitting to go to medical school. He said he still looked back on those years in the seminary as the most important years of his life.

That morning she pours Teacher's over my belly and licks it off. That afternoon she tries to jump out the window.

Then I said something. I said, Suppose, just suppose, nothing had ever happened. Suppose this was for the first time. Just suppose. It doesn't hurt to suppose. Say none of the other had ever happened. You know what I mean? Then what? I said.

I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone's heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.