People--stupid when they lived; potentially stupid when they died.

Memories - you can't escape them, but you can't let them rule you either.

It is now. It is always now. Now is good. Now could be the best. My name is Catcher. My name was Catcher. My name...my name... I am... I am lost, I am found and then I am free and I am happy. When I jump over that edge, someone leaps with me, shoulder to shoulder. I smell kinship on him. Kinship is all. I'm not alone. Never alone. I land, earth below me, moon above. I am wolf. We are pack. And that is all I need.

Most kids don't believe in fairy tales very long. Once they hit six or seven they put away "Cinderella" and her shoe fetish, "The Three Little Pigs" with their violation of building codes, "Miss Muffet" and her well‐shaped tuffet—all forgotten or discounted.And maybe that's the way it has to be. To survive in the world, you have to give up the fantasies, the make‐believe.

Why is it always the world? Why is it never just half a block? Or Jersey? You know, something we could live without?

Every inner touch, every one of its fingerprints on my brain, burned like acid. It shredded the walls of my soul like tissue paper, it clawed its way into my very center, I couldn’t tell anymore where it began and I ended. It poured into me like a river into the sea, mixing, melding, until we were one. One. For better or worse. Until death do us part.

All I cared was that she had never lied. She was honest in a world just the opposite, and a cool oasis in my life. She was who she said she was, and everything Sophia, my mother, the pathologically manipulative liar, had never been.