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....

I was just learning how to read and was reading every sign out loud, practising, and when I saw Cockburn Avenue I said Cock Burn Avenue and then asked what's that? And Elf, she must have been eleven...

I learned another thing, which is that just because someone is eating the ashes of your protagonist doesn't mean you stop telling the story.

That to truly know happiness is to know the fleeting nature of everything, joy, pain, safety and happiness itself.

Remember what mom used to say? Shred the guilt.

What you do at the pulpit would be considered lunatic behaviour on the street. You can't go around terrorizing people and making them feel small and shitty and then call them evil when they destroy...

They say nothing is my fault, and I wish they wouldn't say that. How can a man be forgiven if nothing is his fault?

Books are what save us. Books are what don't save us.

… to survive something we first need to know what it is we are surviving

In the airport we hugged each other all at once, a team huddle but with nothing but a Hail Mary left in our playbook. We'd been through all of this before. We loved each other. We fought for each...

... it was ludicrous to think that we could just talk our way out of shame, that shame was necessary, that it prevented us from repeating shameful actions and that it motivated us to say we were sorry...

The guy's name was Colt.Colt, said Thebes. Like a baby, male horse?I guess, said the guy, or a gun.Well, which do you prefer? she said.What do you mean? he asked.Like, how do you prefer to think of...

You put the fist in pacifist?

Do you feel that we can rebel against our oppressors without losing our love, our tolerance, and our ability to forgive?

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...