The best thing about being fifteen is that you don't have to be fifteen for more than a year.

He's so proud of you, Archie, his mother said. He just doesn't know what to say or how to say it. He's a man who never learned how to talk.

She could never feel at home in this world, could live in the present only as a kind of tourist, as if she were just passing through, longing to go back to where she had come from.

[...] which was perhaps the real definition of happiness, not knowing you were happy, not caring about anything except being alive in the now.

That was perhaps their greatest bond, the need for music that ran through their bodies, which at that point in their lives was no different from the need to find a way to exist in the world.

He understood that fourteen was the worst possible age on the calendar of human life, and therefore all fourteen-year-olds were confused and fractured beings, not one of them a child anymore and not one of them an adult, none quite right in the head or at home in his unfinished body.

A crowd could sometimes express a hidden truth that no one person in the crowd would have dared to express on his own.

God was nowhere, he said to himself, but life was everywhere, and death was everywhere, and the living and the dead were joined.

What a curious pair they were - a wounded boy screaming love with each act of hostility towards his father and a wounded father emanating love by not slapping him down, by letting himself be punched.

Let the woman behind him sob her heart out, it probably made her feel better, but he would never feel better and therefore he didn't have the right to cry, he only had the right to think, to try to understand what was happening, this big thing that resembled nothing else that ever happened to him.