We tiptoed around each other like heartbreaking new friends.

Nevertheless we understood each other on all levels of madness...

When I got better I realized what a rat he was, but then I had to understand the impossible complexity of his life, how he had to leave me there, sick, to get on with his wives and woes.

If all the world were green, there would be no such thing as the color green. Similarly, men cannot know what it is to be together without otherwise knowing what it is to be apart. If all the world were love, then, how could love exist? This is why we turn away from each other on moments of great happiness and closeness. How can we know happiness and closeness without contrasting them, like lights?

And so we picked up our bags, he the trunk with his one good arm and I the rest, and staggered up to the cable-car stop; in a moment rolled down the hill with our legs dangling to the sidewalk from the jiggling shelf, two broken-down heroes of the Western night.

Nonetheless we understood each other on other levels of madness...

All I hope, Dean, is someday we'll be able to live on the same street with our families and get to be a couple of oldtimers together.

There's a lot of pretense out there. It can be exhausting. When people see something genuine, even if it's something as simple as two people actually being friends, actually enjoying what they're doing, or actually standing up for each other, that translates in a big way.

I think love can be really tough. Because it involves ultimately an honesty to the nth degree that you are capable of. Once said, you've lost your deposit. It's best if you don't say it.

Come, let's be a comfortable couple and take care of each other! How glad we shall be, that we have somebody we are fond of always, to talk to and sit with.

They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.

Friendship is a deep oneness that develops when two people, speaking the truth in love to one another, journey together to the same horizon.