"Linda was nine then, as I was, but we were in love. And it was real. When I write out her now, three decades later, it's tempting to dismiss it as a crush, an infatuation of childhood, but I know for a fact that what we felt for each other was as deep and rich as love can ever get. It had all the shadings and complexities of mature adult love, and maybe more, because there were not yet words for it, and because it was not yet fixed to comparisons or chronologies or the ways by which adults measure such things. I just loved her. She had poise and great dignity. Her eyes, I remember, were deep brown like her hair, and she was slender and very quiet and fragile-looking. Even then, at nine years old, I wanted to live inside her body. I wanted to melt into her bones--that kind of love. Down inside I had important things to tell her, big profound things, but I couldn't make any words come out. I had trouble breathing. Now and then I'd glance over at her, thinking how beautiful she was: her white skin and those dark brown eyes and the way she always smiled at the world--always, it seemed-- as if her face had been designed that way. The smile never went away."

"Sanity. You can go through your whole life telling yourself that life is logical. Life is prosaic, life is sane. Above all, sane. And I think it is….I think; therefore I am. We live in the best of all possible worlds, so hand me a kent for my left, a bud for my right, turn on Starsky and Hutch, and listen to that soft harmonious note that is the universe turning smoothly on its celestial gyrose. Logic and sanity. Like Coca-Cola, it’s the real thing. But as Warner Brothers, John D. MacDonald, and Long Island Dragway know so well, there’s a Mr. Hyde for every happy Jekyll face, a dark face on the other side of the mirror….The astronomers call that line between light and dark the terminator. The other side says that the universe has all the logic of a little kid in a halloween cowboy suit with his guts and his trick or treat candy spread all over a mile of interstate 95. This is the logic of napalm, paranoia, suitcase bombs, random carcinoma. This logic eats itself. It says life spins as hysterically and erratically as the penny you flick to see who buys lunch. No one looks at this side unless they have to. It’s a roulette wheel, but anybody who says the game is rigged is whining. No matter how many numbers there are, the principle of that little jittering ball never changes. Don’t say it’s crazy. It’s all cool. It’s all sane. — And all that weirdness isn’t just going on outside. It’s in you too. Right now."