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...

I wondered if it was possible to donate my body to science before I was actually dead. I wondered if a disease were to be named after me what the symptoms would be.

It was the first time that we had sort of articulated our major problem. She wanted to die and I wanted her to live and we were enemies who loved each other.

Life being what it is, one dreams not of revenge. One just dreams.

But whatever, we descendants of the Girl Line may not have wealth and proper windows in our drafty homes but at least we have rage and we will build with that, gentlemen.

…just because someone is eating the ashes of your protagonist doesn't mean you stop telling the story.

Can't you just be like the rest of us, normal and sad and fucked up and alive and remorseful?

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

Is it wrong to trust in a beautiful lie if it helps you get through life?

The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost. - Gilbert K. Chesterton

Stuart Mill wrote, 'It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different...

She also managed to save Gilbert Stuart's masterpiece portrait of George Washington, one of the few works of art to survive the ensuing fire.

She turned to Roy with her gayest expression. He smiled back at her with what Phil called his deep, black, velvety smile. Yet, she really did not see Roy at all. She was acutely conscious that Gilbert...

Finally, she turned and headed for home. She planned to fix herself a cup of lemon-ginger tea and pick a book from the stack on her coffee table. It didn't matter which title she chose, every book had...

I also reread my Nancy Drew collection every few years.

That's my main priority when it comes to food. Other people are obsessed with calories, nutritional value, antioxidants. I look at food and wonder: Can I eat that without having to put my book down?

The wound is the place where the light enters you. -Pablo Neruda

A library of books is the fairest garden in the world, and to walk there is an ecstasy. -The Arabian Nights