Forget the noose. Forget the Iron Maiden. Forget the electric chair or the guillotine. The mind was mankind's most painful torture chamber, the blessed liberty to cogitate offering either doom or salvation, depending on one's disposition.

I'd never seen that look on another face before, had never identified it in another person. I'd only met with it in fiction. But everyone falls in love with Holden Caulfield when they're sixteen. They read Catcher in the Rye and don't feel so alone.

Nobody, and I mean nobody, ever started a revolution playing by the rules

This is what it means to be in the middle of love, I thought. Being in the middle of love is like being in the middle of a war zone.

Lying next to Eliza, I had the feeling I had I'd just found something I didn't even know I'd lost.

And if my aunt had balls she'd be my uncle.

That's the only way I could describe the music. It was the sonic equivalent of flight