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...

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...