Quotes from Adam Rapp

It was like losing an important weight-bearing bone, and I knew I would spend the rest of my life trying to figure out how to walk the streets without it.

Love, Jamie P.S. I can't believe you're dying. Please don't die.

And then again, maybe it was some weird noise in my brother's head, some little digital murmur he never told anyone about. I've heard about that – how you wake up one day and there's like this permanent dial tone droning somewhere behind the meat in your head, a little Dustbuster trapped where the brain saves you from going crazy. After a while you wind up ending it all just to make things quiet again.

Back to his various modes of escape and survival. Because you have to escape to survive, as you must survive to escape.

I was so in love I went into my room and drank half a bottle of Robitussin.

When I got inside, I just sort of stood there. There's nothing stranger than the smell of someone else's house. The scent goes right to your stomach. Mary's house smelled like lemon furniture polish and oatmeal cookies and logs in a fireplace. For some reason it made me want to curl up in the fetal position. I could have slept right there on their kitchen table.

On top of everything else, Boobie's got the clap.

Books don't change lives... People change lives... Sometimes, if you're lucky, if you get the thing right, a book can say some important things and that's all fine and good... but a book is just an artifact... a thing that sits on a desk or a shelf... People make the real difference... People and love...

I imagine a soul is a little perfect crystal egg floating in your chest. Somewhere deeper than where they put your heart. Somewhere so deep inside that the doctors can't find it with all their machines and microcameras.

Things were pretty cold-blooded back in Rockdale. That's when my arms were so pretty I could hold them up to the light and see the veins curling all clean and smooth like little blue branches.

At the funeral my stitches were itching like crazy, but it didn't bother me much because I was like totally tripping on the codeine they'd prescribed for the pain. They cremated my mom and stuffed her ashes into a pine box and put an eight-by-ten photo next to it. In the photo she was wearing too much makeup and it made me want to smash it with my fist.

After his rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner," Welton just stared straight ahead at the alter as if he were waiting for Jesus to climb down off the cross and escape with him. They would load up in Dantly's Skylark and the three of them would go score some Ex in Cedar Rapids. Jesus would like totally ride shotgun and scout for cops.

Once I heard Dantly tell Welton that the Native Americans used to call that particular part of the morning "between the wolf and the dog" because the sky is so deep blue and spooky or whatever that you can't tell what's what. Is that a wolf on that hill or a dog? A man or a monkey? A saint or the devil?

No one answered. You could hear the light buzzing over us. I love that sound. It means school isn't working, that the teachers are losing the battle.

For some reason, I kept trying to see how much pubic hair he had. It was all matted and kind of orange, like something you use to scrub soap scum. When he caught me looking, he told me that the landlord on the show – Mr. Furley or whatever his name was – didn't try hard enough. "That guy doesn't try hard enough, Steve," he said. I felt weirdly ashamed when he said that. So much so that I went into his room and urinated on his bed.

Mrs. Leene says I should think about people in the present tense. "It forces you to take responsibility for them," she says.

I sat there for a moment and thought about my mom. It was her groans of pain that would get me the most. Sometimes they didn't even sound human. Sometimes she sounded like a cow, and for some weird reason, that made me think about hamburgers and I suddenly realized how starved I was.

When I kicked in the first TV – a nineteen-inch Magnavox with wicker speaker panels – it felt like the most perfect thing I had done in a long time. And there's nothing like the feeling of perfection that will inspire repeated behavior

We only have so much time, Mary," I remember saying. "Time will kill you – it really will.

The house was full of murmuring voices. I could practically feel each room getting choked with the hot breath of other people.

There must be some unwritten law that says about fifty people have to move into your house when somebody dies. If it weren't for the smell of death clinging to the walls, you might think it was your family's turn to host the month neighborhood potluck supper. A little beef and bingo at the Nugents'.

Once I looked over at Welton and he was wiping his nose. I couldn't tell if he was crying or on nasal spray.

My dad smelled sort of like mustard, which is probably due to the fact that in the bed I also discovered a thing of Hellmann's. I wanted to grab it and squirt it in his eyes, but I couldn't reach it.

Man, that's the only kind of book I like – one that's so real you want to find out everything there is to know about the person who wrote it, like how tall he is and what kind of music he likes and whether or not he really went through all the stuff he was writing about.