“So this is it. You are scored on my heart, Clark. You were from the first day you walked in, with your ridiculous clothes and your bad jokes and your complete inability to ever hide a single thing you felt.”

There is a hunger in you. A fearlessness. You just buried it, like most people do.

Oh, Clark,if you had any idea what I want to do to you right now.And I…i can’t live with that knowledge. I can’t. It’s Not who I am. I can’t be the kind of man who just…accepts.

And it was suddenly very simple: There was no choice.

But don’t blame me for the food. My wife knows a hundred and one ways to incinerate a cow, and as far as I can tell she’s still experimenting.

The thing about being catapulted into a whole new life–or at least, shoved up so hard against someone else’s life that you might as well have your face pressed against their window.

Do I do this to you?, he wondered, as he watched her eat. Or is this just the relief of being out from under the forbidden eye of that husband of yours?

I can’t do this because I can’t…I can’t be the man I want to be with you. And that means that this – this just becomes…another reminder of what I am not.

And then you walk into a room one day, whether it’s at university or an office or some kind of club, and you just go, ‘Ah. There they are.’ And suddenly you feel at home.

Do you know how hard it is to say nothing? When every atom of you strains to do the opposite?

Much to my own surprise, I got through it. And life…well, gradually became livable again.

Know that you hold my heart, my hopes, in your hands.

​​​​​​You’re going to feel uncomfortable in your new world for a bit. It always does feel strange to be knocked out of your comfort zone.

Believe me, you have to have a certain confidence in your powers of descretion to let a dentist loose with a drill in your mouth less than an hour after you’ve…um…entertained his wife.

Knowing you still have possibilities is a luxury. Knowing I might have given them to you has alleviated something for me.

I had practiced not saying anything the whole way from the airport, and it was still nearly killing me.

Is that it forces you to rethink your idea of who you are. Or how you might seem to other people.

Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.

Yeah, at first people were talking about me. But now everyone is wearing their clothes more fitted.

I beg the reader not to go in search of messages. It is a term that I detest because it distresses me greatly, for it forces on me clothes that are not mine, which in fact belong to a human type that I distrust; the prophet, the soothsayer, the seer.

When I entered high school I was an A-student, but not for long. I wanted the fancy clothes. I wanted to hang out with the guys. I went from being an A-student to a B-student to a C-student, but I didn’t care. I was getting the high fives and the low fives and the pats on the back. I was cool.

I’m just showing my personality in my clothing.

The clothes are not making me If I like it, that’s all that mattersIt’s not about the clothes. It’s about how I am as a person and how confident I am.

Sadness does not inhere in things; it does not reach us from the world and through mere contemplation of the world. It is a product of our own thought. We create it out of whole cloth.

Our clothes are too much a part of us for most of us ever to be entirely indifferent to their condition: it is as though the fabric were indeed a natural extension of the body, or even of the soul.