Now I am in the place I call this wide wide Heaven because it includes all my simplest desires but also the most humble and grand. The word my grandfather uses is comfort. So there are cakes and pillows and colors galore, but underneath this more obvious patchwork quilt are places like a quiet room where you can go and hold someone's hand and not have to say anything. Give no story. Make no claim. Where you can live at the edge of your skin for as long as you wish.

The alcohol had the effect of making the black cloth blacker. This amused her; she had noted in her journal: "booze affects material as it does people.

The living deserve attention, too

It's something that I know how to do because I taught for a very long time, so I can do it, and I feel a responsibility to do it - for instance, in this situation, where I'm touring specifically for this period of time. But most writers are not public people. There are a few writers out there who really enjoy it and are good at it, and can both work and do that at the same time, but I'm not one of those people.

As she stood in the darkened room and watched my sister and father, I knew one of things that heaven meant. I had a choice, and it was not to divide my family in my heart.

What did dead mean, Ray wondered. It meant lost, it meant frozen, it meant gone.

She didn't even have to smile, and she rarely did outside her house--it was the eyes, her dancer's carriage, the way she seemed to deliberate over the smallest movement of her body.