Love among the ruins... I'll tell you something, my friend: Weird love's better than no love at all.

Every marriage has two hearts, one light and one dark

You're dead, George. You just don't have the sense to lie down.

That's something that is almost accidental at the beginning of a career, but the more you write, the more trained you are to recognize the little signals.

Do any of us, except in our dreams, truly expect to be reunited with our hearts' deepest loves, even when they leave us only for minutes, and on the most mundane of errands? No, not at all. Each time they go from our sight we in our secret hearts count them as dead. Having been given so much, we reason, how could we expect not to be brought as low as Lucifer for the staggering presumption of our love?

He realized now that a lot of the problem had been his own mind, which was usually moving at a speed ten or twenty times that of his classmates. They had thought him strange, weird, or even suicidal, depending on the escapade in question, but maybe it had been a simple case of mental overdrive-if anything about being in constant mental overdrive was simple. Anyway, it was the sort of thing you got under control after a while-you got it under control or you found outlets for it.

Sometimes stories cry out to be told in such loud voices that you write them just to shut them up.