When I came into your life your life was over. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is the end. You can say that things could have turned out differently. That they could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way.

Doomed enterprises divide lives forever into the then and now

Your god must once have stood at a dawn of infinite possibilities, and this is what he's made of it. You tell me that I want God's love? I don't. Perhaps I want forgiveness, but there's no-one to ask it of. And there's no going back, there's no setting things right, there's only the hope of nothingness.

Teaching writing is a hustle.

In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was.

This is my child, he said. I wash a dead man's brains out of his hair. That is my job.

They came upon themselves in a mirror and he almost raised the pistol. It's us, Papa, the boy whispered. It's us.