“We always see our worst selves. Our most vulnerable selves. We need someone else to get close enough to tell us were wrong. Someone we trust.”

“You know the reason The Beatles made it so big?...'I Wanna Hold Your Hand.' First single. Fucking brilliant. Perhaps the most fucking brilliant song ever written. Because they nailed it. That's wha...”

“It scares me how hard it is to remember life before you. I can't even make the comparisons anymore, because my memories of that time have all the depth of a photograph. It seems foolish to play gam...”

“It doesn't have to be on Valentine's Day. It doesn't have to be by the time you turn eighteen or thirty-three or fifty-nine. It doesn't have to conform to whatever is usual. It doesn't have to be k...”

“The way you're singing in your sleepThe way you look before you leapThe strange illusions that you keepYou don't knowBut I'm noticingThe way your touch turns into arcsThe way you slide into the dar...”

“Things that matter are not easy. Feelings of happiness are easy. Happiness is not. Flirting is easy. Love is not. Saying youre friends is easy. Being friends is not.”

“What sexual preference do you hope she has? Happiness. Isnt that cool?”

“[Two respondents] minimized the assimilationist implications of the dominant account; Russ Silver rejects the idea entirely.I have no interest in being accepted. I consider this system corrupt, and...”

“For life is too short to resign ourselves to reading poorly written books and sleeping with women we don't love.”

“Sex can be used either for self-affirmation or for self-transcendence either to intensify the ego and consolidate the social persona by some kind of conspicuous embarkation and heroic conquest, or...”

“He didn't know all that much about how the machinery worked anyway. Such knowledge was for specialists. In war, as in love, he was a fearless, happy-go-lucky adventurer.”

“If she did experience sex--or something close to it--in high school, I'm sure it would have been less out of sexual desire or love than literary curiosity.”

“Sexuality is not meant to be this way - an honest, consensual expression in which a girl might take an active role when she feels good and ready and not one minute before. No. Sexual desire is mean...”

“Michael, some people are just confused about their sexuality, trying to come to terms with it. There are others who are bisexual too; it doesnt mean she was trying to deceive you. She must have jus...”

“Youth, it appeared, was full of illusions as to how much sexual energy two people might have to spare while hiking forty or so kilometers a day, concussed, stunned, diseased, on poor food and littl...”