If I shut my eyes, I believed, I would disappear. To make it through, I had to be present the whole time.

You could not be filled with hate and be beautiful. Like any other girl, I wanted to be beautiful. But I was filled with hate.

Heaven is comfort, but it's still not living.

I have always felt extremely weird. But I am very happy with my weirdnesses, and I want other people to be very happy with theirs.

He would find his Susie,inside his young son. Give that love to the living.

I couldn't help but think, as I watched him, of the barrels of toxic fluids that had accrued behind Hal's bike shop where the scrub lining the railroad tracks had offered local companies enough cover to dump a stray contaner or two. Everything had been sealed up, but things were beginning to leak out. I had come to both pity and respect Len in the years since my mother left. He followed the physical to try to understand things that were impossible to comphrehend. In that, I could see, he was like me.

but, he also said it because part of him wanted more of her, this cold woman who was not exactly cold, this rock who was not stone.