"Introductions are polite, so let's start here."

" 'I'll be right here,' I said. 'I won't let you fall.' I slowly let her go but kept my hands about an inch away from her trunk. 'See? I'm right here.' "

"That was my childhood, then. Wealthy? Yes. Sheltered? Yes. Lonely, absolutely yes. But it was hardly something I should call unhappy."

"That September it was as hot as July. Our church hadn't yet bought its two central air units for the sanctuary and parish hall (the units were eventually nicknamed Paul and Silas because they were nested in a protective barred metal cage that looked vaguely like a jail) so the only relief from the heat came from open windows, and from several electric floor fans that did little real cooling. I was roasting in my vestments."

"It was some time shortly after the consecration of the Host that I succumbed to the heat and, I think, the incense and the candle smoke, and lost consciousness."

"And there you have it. We must look away from the world of phenomena and direct our eyes to the sublime."

"The other change that came with adolescence, and this, alas, brought problems enough to cause me trouble, was that I discovered sex. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that sex discovered me. I was unaware. I was so ignorant that you, who read these memories I have committed to paper, will probably want to laugh... Or maybe cry. I don't know.

See through my eyes."

"A little after that, he gives me my very first kiss, and I have my second orgasm that day, and learn that I have something called a hair trigger."

"I was stupid. I wrote about liking being kissed in my diary, which I had thought was stashed in a safe hiding place. The aide found it and took it to my mother."

"In retrospect, I do know that it's not normal to have an experience right out of The Bell Jar."

"One reason things didn't work out was that I discovered girls soon after I discovered sex, but that was only one contributing factor. There were many, many others, foremost of which could be summed up by saying that attraction does not always coincide with compatibility. Forget the old saying. Amor, eheu, non omnia vincit."

"Desire shakes us like thunder."

"That was in mid-April. Two weeks later came the spring formal. If you are wondering how much religious angst, self-recrimination, second-guessing, and general worrying a sedevacantist Catholic and an Apostolic Pentecostal can produce when coming out of the closet to each other and falling in love, or maybe, if we are being honest with each other, in an infatuation so overwhelming and hopeless that it seems virtually indistinguishable from love, the answer is: A lot."

"Oh, my lady. Let me fill the night with your cries. I want to hear nothing else. I want my ears to be filled with your beauty."

"Then came May, and with May, spring finals, and the end of the semester. We had a private graduation celebration of our own, beautiful, wretched, passionate, ecstatic, and above all, awkward."

"It didn't take either of us long to slide from indoctrinated chastity to bouquets of lovers, and that should surprise no one. Ever see a kid with sudden freedom and an allowance to spend let loose in a candy store after years of being forced to live on nothing but macrobiotic health food?"

" Stars. Burning and dancing in space. We are burning and closing in and we are mad swarming particles consuming each other and we are the explosion, the end, the beginning, light too bright to comprehend, transfixed."

"That. Magic was what just happened. Magic. The universe spins above me, dizzying me, and I am lost in the whirl."

"That was how I discovered magick. I discovered something else, arguably another form of magick, a couple of months later, shortly before the beginning of winter break; although at the time I had no idea how to contextualize it. Silly me."

"When we fight together, we probably look like storks trying to do interpretive dance."