...his love was too much for him, he felt paralyzed, he wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and be smothered.

There was the single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss for things to carry.

For Rat Kiley, I think, facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around, and when you listened to one of his stories, you'd find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracting superlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute and then multiplying by maybe.

Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories.

What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end.

you're never more alive than when you're almost dead.

I did not set out to write another novel. One day I sat down with the thought of trying my hand at a piece of nonfiction, a personal memoir of youth, but over the next several weeks, without intending it, the work began evolving into what has become 'Tomcat in Love.