Never explain, never retract, never apologize. Just get the thing done and let them howl.

Between 2005-2009, more than 300 girls and women of Molotschna were made unconscious and attacked in their own beds. On average, an attack occurred every three or four days.Finally, Leisl Neustandter...

I don't know now why I let her believe otherwise, but someday, perhaps, it will be clear.

The director said he's got a haunted soul and a natural sweetness.

Everytime I looked at it I was reminded that I was, at that very moment, not bleeding from my face. And those are powerful words of hope, really. - Nomi

She says isn't it funny how every second, every minute, every day, month, year, is accounted for, capable of being named-when time, or life, is so unwieldy, so intangible and slippery?

I sat on my Dad's bed and flipped through the page after empty page. No stamps. No exotic locales. No travel-worn smudges or creases. Just the ID information and my mother's black and white photo...

That's me! Elf had said. I reminded her that she had her sight, she could see, she'd always been able to see but she told me she'd never adjusted to the light, she'd just never developed a tolerance...

Why is it so painful to write about people who aren't assholes? I asked Wilson.Because I would start to love them, he said.

Stuff was happening. Even in Half-a-Life. Little things, but it all added up to something big. To our lives. It was happening all along. These were our lives. This was it. My mom was hanging onto the...

Wealthier Mennonites even though they're not technically supposed to be wealthy do their drinking in North Dakota or Hawaii. They are sort of like rock bands on tour in that the rules of this town...

I think Ray might have wanted a son. One night when I was seven or eight I announced to my family that I wanted to play hockey with the boys on Friday nights and Ray became just a little too eager....

My dad had said don't look, but I'd already seen him. Pickled eggs are the Devil's snack.

Yoli, she said, I'm just saying that apologies aren't the bedrock of civilized society. All right! I said. I agree. But what is the bedrock of civilized society? Libraries, said Elf.

We were making good time now, barrelling through the bodacious curves of southeastern Utah and ignoring all impending signs of trouble with the van. At least I was."You guys happy?" I said.The kids...

Later that evening I lay down in Min's empty bed upstairs and pulled her white sheet up over my head. I felt for my kneecaps and hip bones. I lay perfectly still, arms down, palms up. I closed my eyes...

When we got back to the house Logan grabbed his basketball, threw it really hard against the hallway wall, knocked the framed family photo to the floor-it didn't break, he didn't pick it up-and left...

Yolandi, the central character in the book "All My Puny Sorrows" says that "the core of the argument for it {assisted suicide} is maximizing individual autonomy and minimizing human suffering" {p....

My mother was so confident of being rescued in life, one way or another or another.

You always say oh, that's so unprofessional as though there's some definition of professional that's also a moral imperative for how to behave.

I stood there, like always, like forever it seemed, in the middle of the road waiting for something or someone to retrieve me, God or a parent or my husband or any of those things or people or ideas...

Maybe she was enjoying a moment in her life, a sliver of light, a flash memory of one of her kids, something sweet and approaching reality.

suffering, even though it may have happened a long time ago, is something that is passed from one generation to the next to the next, like flexibility or grace or dyslexia. My grandfather had big...

He's in love with the notion of shame and he traffics the shit like a schoolground pusher, spreading it around but never personally using.

Alcohol, sadness, impulsive, regrettable behavior. Those were his reasons. The staples of discord. I understood. Sometimes he sends me e-mails that are so formal they seem to have been drafted by a...

Wild was the worst thing you could become in a community rigged for compliance.

I understand that if you say a certain word over and over and it begins to make you feel bad then you should goddamn stop saying that word.

Do you know that hobo is an acronym for Homeward Bound?

Go into hard things quickly, eagerly, then retreat. It's the same for thinking, writing, and life.

It was the first time in my life that I had been aware of my own existence. It was the first time in my life I had realized that I was alive. And if I was alive, then I could die, and I mean forever....