Well, as my dad would say, it means she’s out of this shithole.

All you have to do is desire it, and if you desire it enough and understand why -- really know -- it will come.

No one on the street thought anything of the downtown girl dressed in black who had paused in the middle of midtown foot traffic. In her art student camouflage she could walk the entire length of Manhattan and, if not blend in, be classified and therefore ignored.

Do you miss Susie?" Because it was dark, because Ruth was facing away from her,because Ruth was almost a stranger, Lindsey said what she felt. "More than anyone will ever know.

How to Commit the Perfect Murder" was an old game in heaven. I always chose the icicle: the weapon melts away.

These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections-sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent-that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.

Learn a language of another country and then you can go to that country: a place where the problems of your family will not follow. A language they do not speak.