• She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it's there, because it can't hurt, and because what difference does it make?

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• She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.

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• this is what happens when you live in dreams, he thought: you dream this and you dream that and you sleep right through your life.

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• All I could do was hold him. Holding that man in my arms I knew: that hug, that physical contact meant more to him in that moment that it meant to me to remain in my own personal space. So I held him and let him cry against my shoulder so that he could breathe for that small space in time before he had to go back to his life.

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• (and yet, there is something in my skin now, after all these years, that hums of the world in a way that predicts the infinite.)

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• i woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was — I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future.

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• Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.