I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together, in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.

Those awful things are survivable, because we are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be. When adults say, "Teenagers think they are invincible" with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don't know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.

Thomas Edison´s last words were, "It´s very beautiful over there." I don´t know where there is, but I know it´s somewhere, and I hope it´s beautiful.

People, I thought, wanted security. They couldn´t bear the idea of death being a big black nothing, couldn´t bear the thought of their loved ones not existing and couldn´t even imagine themselves not existing. I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn´t bear not to.

She tought me everything I knew about crawfish and kissing and pink wine and poetry. She made me different.

Alaska decided to go help Dolores with dinner. She said it was sexist to leave the cooking to the women, but better to have good sexist food than crappy boy-prepared food.

Swimming towards us like a swan possessed. Wings flapping furiously as it came, and then it was on the shore in front of us, making a noise that sounded like nothing else in this world, like all the worst parts of a dying rabbit plus all the worst parts of a crying baby, and there was no other way, so we just ran.

"I believe," Dolores said, "that yer s´posed to drink white with turkey, but - now I don´t know ´bout yáll - but I don´t s´pose I give a shit."

...i.e. the ragtag bunch of drama people and English geeks I sat with by social necessity...

There are times when it is appropriate, even preferable, to get an erection when someone´s face is in close proximity to your penis. This was not one of those times.