Things shouldn't hinge on so very little. Sneeze and you're highway carnage. Remove one tiny stone and bang, you're an avalanche statistic. But I guess if you can die without ever understanding how it...

The town office building has a giant filing cabinet full of death certificates that say choked to death on his own anger or suffocated from unexpressed feelings of unhappiness.

I couldn't see him but I could hear him snoring softly, humming, like a little airplane lost in the clouds.

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? This makes her...

My mother tells Tina that she doesn't like books where the protagonist is established as Sad on page one. Okay, she's sad! We get it, we know what sad is, and then the whole book is basically a...

And all our righteousnesses are filthy rags and we all do fade as a leaf and our inequities like the wind have taken us away

Nomi, he said, you just need to wake up to the fact that other people need to know where you're going. But there's nobody behind me, I told him. And he said, reassuringly, that someday there may be.

She was a strange, unsettled planet that had had once sustained life. She was a language that I had thought I almost understood even though I couldn't speak it. She hadn't always been this way. She...

It seemed like he could never figure out which Trudie he loved the best, the docile church basement lady in the moon boots or the rebellious chick with the sexy lingerie. I imagine that both of those...

And I was scrambling around trying to make money and to study and master {and fail at mastering} the art of being an adult.

Where does violence go, if not directly back into our blood and bones?

Being seasick at sea is not the same as being homesick at home.

But there is a kindness here, a complicated kindness. You can see it sometimes in the eyes of people when they look at you and don't know what to say.

It's raining questions around here. A person could drown in them.

When I listened to her play I felt I should not be in the same room with her. There were hundreds of people but nobody left. It was a private pain. By private I mean to say unknowable. Only the music...

There are no windows within the dark house of depression through which to see others, only mirrors.

If you have to end up in the hospital, try to focus all your pain in your heart rather than your head.

One night I heard my dad say to my mom: I can't help but think of the good times we're having now as being painful memories later on. And my mom saying, c'mon now honey.

After that we tried thirty-nine times to stand together on the tube until we finally did. It was fun. I liked the falling part, and holding hangs. Relationships were so easy when all you had to work...

It bothered me in a kind of Charles Manson way to have a brown smear of blood on my wall but I also liked it because every time I looked at it I was reminded that I was, at that very moment, not...

Nothing happens in my life. Nothing has to happen, she said, for it to be life.

If, along the way, something is gained, then something will also be lost.

And then I thought that people like to talk about their pain and loneliness but in disguised ways. Or in ways that are sort of organized but not really. I realized that when I try to start...

A few weeks ago my uncle came over to borrow my dad's socket set and when he asked my dad how he was my dad said oh unexceptional. Living quietly with my disappointments. And how are you

The other day I found her passport in her drawer when I was putting away my dad's laundered handkerchiefs. I wish I hadn't. For the purpose of my story, she should have it with her. I sat on my dad's...

Go into hard things quickly, eagerly, then retreat.

It's hard to grieve in a town where everything that happens is God's will. It's hard to know what to do with your emptiness when you're not supposed to have emptiness.

It may have been the light at 5:36 on a June evening or it may have been the smell of dust combined with sprinkler water or the sound of the neighbour kid screaming I'll kill you but suddenly it was...

Sadness is what holds our bones in place.

I had a thought, on the way home from the rock field, that the things we don't know about a person are the things that make them human, and it made me feel sad to think that, but sad in that...