I stared at her black hair. It was shiny like the promises in magazines.

How could it be that you could love someone so much and keep it secret from yourself as you woke daily so far from home?

Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.

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.

Almost everyone in heaven has someone on Earth they watch, a loved one, a friend or even a stranger who was once kind, who offered warm food or a bright smile when one of us had needed it. And when I wasn’t watching I could hear the others talking to those they loved on Earth: just as fruitlessly as me, I’m afraid. A one-sided card cajoling and coaching of the young, a one way loving and desiring of their mates, a single-sided card that could never get signed.

A lot of people ask questions that they don't want to answer themselves, and if we're honest about the intimacy that we have with our parents, you wish them the best and you wish them the worst more than anybody else in the world. I think everyone has had a moment in their life where they wished a parent ill, and I think it's perhaps a very romantic idea that that doesn't happen.

What I think was hardest for me to realize was that he had tried each time to stop himself. He had killed animals, taking lesser lives to keep from killing a child