Don’t swear off all the fruits just because you ate one bad apple.

I’m almost thirty and my day job is folding shirts at the Gap. Have you seen my room? I’m not messy. I’m rebelling against folding.

I need to know that wherever I end up, in the stars or in the gutter, you’re along for the ride.

Jacob was the only person I’d ever met, besides myself, who believed music was a cosmic language that spoke directly to our souls – to ease our pain, and to remind us we weren’t alone.

I am of the theory that all of our transcendental connections, anything we’re drawn to, be it a person, a song, a painting on a wall – they’re magnetic. The art is the alloy, so to speak. And our souls are equipped with whatever properties are required to attract that alloy. I’m no scientist so I don’t really know what the hell these properties are, but my point is we’re drawn to stuff we’ve already got a connection to. Part of the thing is already inside of us.

This is what it means to be in the middle of love, I thought. Being in the middle of love is like being in the middle of a war zone.

I’ve got my girl and my guitar, and for me that’s enough.

That’s why you have to save the dying man. Because you want him around to keep saving you.

The minute Jacob learned his father’s life had become what, in relation to him it had been all along, an apparition, is when I saw desire begins to fade from his eyes. Jacob searched harder than ever for meaning in his being. His body had been orphaned long before, but this time, Thomas Doorley had taken his soul. Because a soul never truly loses hope until hope has turned to ashes, or has been buried six feet underground.

It was as if all the melancholy I’d ever known, all the nights I sat alone thinking life sucked, had added up to our place in the world- finally a good place- and the spirit of that rightness was meant to echo on until the end of time.