"Why is it that you don't love me?"
"Sometimes I wish I knew..."
"Don't anybody tell him!!"

He wasn't the type for displays of affection, either verbal or not. He was disgusted by couples that made out in the hallways between classes, and got annoyed at even the slightest sappy moments in movies. But I knew he cared about me: he just conveyed it more subtly, as concise with expressing this emotion as he was with everything else. It was in the way he'd put his hand on the small of my back, for instance, or how he'd smile at me when I said something that surprised him. Once I might have wanted more, but I'd come around to his way of thinking in the time we'd been together. And we were together, all the time. So he didn't have to prove how he felt about me. Like so much else, I should just know.

If friends didn’t ask how I was doing, did that mean they didn’t care?

And I wondered if love was too weak a word for what he felt, what he’d done for me. For what I felt for him.

I did not need to know if he could love me.
I needed to know if he could need me.

But you said you did not love our father. How can you have faith in him if you didn’t love him?”
“Maybe that’s the reason,” Adam said slowly, feeling his way. “Maybe if I had loved him I would have been jealous of him. You were. Maybe — maybe love makes you suspicious and doubting. Is it true that when you love a woman you are never sure — never sure of her because you aren’t sure of yourself? I can see it pretty clearly. I can see how you loved him and what it did to you. I did not love him. Maybe he loved me. He tested me and hurt me and punished me and finally he sent me out like a sacrifice, maybe to make up for something. But he did not love you, and so he had faith in you. Maybe — why, maybe it’s a kind of reverse.

Don't be in a hurry to condemn because he doesn't do what you do or think as you think or as fast. There was a time when you didn't know what you know today.

Mostly, I could tell, I made him feel uncomfortable. He didn't understand me, and he was sort of holding it against me. I felt the urge to reassure him that I was like everybody else, just like everybody else. But really there wasn't much point, and I gave up the idea out of laziness.

I might've said 'yes,' not because I love him any more, but because I care more to be loved than when he went away.

I wondered if he ever thought of me, and hated the pang I felt when I told myself he didn't.

If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.

Don’t be in such a hurry to condemn a person because he doesn’t do what you do, or think as you think or as fast. There was a time when you didn’t know what you know today.

We didn’t get along, but he convinced me we did. He made me think that I had a fear of intimacy, when in reality I just hated his goddamn guts.

I didn’t mind being a goof if only he loved me. I felt when we were together that I walked in the gutter and he on the sidewalk. All I did was keep looking up to see if there was love in his eyes