Everybody that went away suffered a broken heart. "I'm coming back some day," they all wrote. But never did. The old life was too small to fit anymore.

We're all strange inside. We learn how to disguise our differences as we grow up.

If you are looking for smart judging based on merit, skip the Academy Awards next year and pay attention to the Independent Spirit Awards.

I wish I knew how to quit you.

And I think that's important, to know how the water's gone over the dam before you start to describe it. It helps to have been over the dam yourself.

He pressed his face into the fabric and breathed in slowly through his mouth and nose, hoping for the faintest smoke and mountain sage and salty sweet stink of Jack but there was no real scent, only the memory of it, the imagined power of Brokeback Mountain of which nothing was left but what he held in his hands.

A spinning coin, still balanced on its rim, may fall in either direction.