It’s hard to fuck your girlfriend when she’s fucked up and you’re not. It’s harder than the skee-ball they used to have at the Plaza arcade, all that agony over a fuzzy piece.

cunt” until I was twenty-three, at which point, admittedly, I couldn’t hold back for a time.

We are going to eat ice cream and we are going to eat shit. The trick is to use different spoons.

It’ll be okay.” We weren’t sure where he had picked up that becalming phrase, probably from us, as we tried to talk ourselves out of the awful lucidity certain days afforded. The whole mirthless dwindle...

I was also one of those people who hadn’t caught up with the latest social networking site. Maura belonged to most of them. She passed most evenings befriending men who had tried to date-rape her...

They sought each other, missed each other, at cocktail parties, in train terminals, at flower shops, their fin de siecle Nokias gaining symbolic power with each scene.

They weren’t like dolls, because dolls had no feelings. Kids had feelings, just not any remotely related to yours.

Yes, the ones that kill you are definitely the worst. […]

I’m a piece of expensive equipment. You, too. Maybe not so expensive. […]

Yes, sir,” I said.

You pay a whore to make you feel like a man, you fund a philharmonic to make yourself feel like a refined man.

You think everyone will stay behind and do everything you did all over again, forever. You picture old geezers in jean jackets doing whip-its behind the plaza.

Okay, you wrinkled old spidercunt, have it your way.

Is this what Principal Fontana meant by the phrase ‘well-rounded’?It’s fucking spherical, Catamounts.

We’d been walking in endless rectangles and now we were near the candy store again. The lights were out, the security gate down. We leaned up against the wall of a bank and I could...

Well, you can be negative. That’s the easy way out.

I get that sometimes. Anyway, see you around.

I’m a citizen of the republic of empathy.

Judging by your face, the what-the-fuck nodes in your cerebral cortex must be a real light show.

I felt as though I were snorting cocaine, or rappelling down a cliffside, or cliffsurfing off a cliff of pure cocaine.

Our friendship, for example, and how quickly we passed through each other, from fascinated strangers to loyal chums to relics of each other’s world. We’d been pawns of proximity, choiceless as brothers.

She liked reality shows the best, and then the shows that purported to be about reality.