“Allowyour old loveto hold your handsand guide you to a new love.— Evolution.”

“Katherine stared intently at the cold, hard steel. She knew it would be loaded and that, if need be, there was extra ammunition in the back of the drawer. She would not be one of those girls, the ones who sit idly by and wait for the answers to come to them.”

“You don’t lose a partner you’ve been with for 30-odd years and just wake up one day with a smile.”

“Sometimes you can cattle rope your heart and sometimes you can’t, is all.”

“Beau, what is it you want?””A porch,” he says softly. He says it like it’s my name, and right then, I think, what both of us want more than anything is something we can never have. “All I really want is to build a house with a nice, big porch that gets used every day.”

“If you could live anywhere in the world where would you live ” “Right here ” Enzo replies. “In your arms.”

“Hey, where are you going?” His voice, confused yet curious, called after me. “Hey. Why didn’t your mother name you Maybe, or We’ll see, or What’s-Your-Number? That way, we could call our first born Absolutely.”

“He felt a little lost, after that experience. Lost as the girls on their knees. It was a never-ending story of young girls losing themselves, such that they were no longer humans with any souls or characters, but pretty girls with fat asses and nice tits.”

“Parents have this twisted belief that anyone under the age of about twenty simply can’t know what love is, like the age to love is assessed in the same way the law assesses the legal age to drink. They think that the ‘emotional growth’ of a teenager’s mind is too underdeveloped to understand love, to know if it’s ‘real’ or not.That’s completely asinine.The truth is that adults love in different ways, not the only way.”

“And now,” Eric yelled into his mircophone, “we’re going to sing a new song-one we just wrote. This one’s for my girlfriend. We’ve been going out for three weeks, and, damn, our love is true. We’re gonna be together forever, baby. This one’s called ‘Bang You Like a Drum.”

“Holding Eleanor’s hand was like holding a butterfly. Or a heartbeat. Like holding something complete, and completely alive.”