I watched my brother and my father. The truth was very different from what we learned in school. The truth was the line between the living and the dead could be, it seemed, murky and blurred.

It's very weird to succeed at thirty-nine years old and realize that in the midst of your failure, you were slowly building the life that you wanted anyway.

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

I think you only learn what kind of personality you have by committing to things.

People grow up by living.

Books and novels in particular that grapple with quite a few things are difficult to explain, so I think that first line can come in a substitute for trying to form a longer sense of what the book is about.

I would like to tell you that I am, and you will one day be, forever safe.