My theory is that everyone at one time or another has been at the fringe of society in some way: an outcast in high school, a stranger in a foreign country, the best at something, the worst at something, the one who's different. Being an outsider is the one thing we all have in common.

If we had paid attention, we would have understood there are some things in this world you cannot outrun.

Let everyone see the blood,' he said. 'Don't clean it up. That's the only way people remember.'... I could see the blood inside my head. It was with me forever, whether or not I wanted to forget.

Holding a tear back makes them drain upward, higher and higher, until one day your head just explodes and you're left with a stub of a neck and nothing more.

You can't dispute the ridiculous. You can't argue reasonably with evil.

Our house was littered with books- in the kitchen, under the beds, stuck between the couch pillows--far too many for her the ever finish. I suppose I thought if my grandmother kept up her interests, she wouldn't die; she'd have to stay around to finish the books she was so fond of. "I've got to get to the bottom of this one," she'd say, as if a book were no different from a pond or a lake. I thought she'd go on reading forever but it didn't work out that way.

Perhaps it is possible to discover more in silence than in speech. Or perhaps it is only that those who are silent among us learn to listen.