Life: a constellation of vital phenomena—organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.

She wanted to hold foreign syllables like mints on her tongue until they dissolved into fluency.

Inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce, and that is who we are.

We all know to feel sympathy for those who've suffered from drug addiction, child abuse, and terminal illness, so the set up elicits an emotional response that the story itself very well may not earn. Energy generated by the fiction itself is likely to produce more light.

You are a coward,' she said, and with that one word wrote a denunciation, a biography, and a prophecy.

We twist our souls around each other’s miseries.

He was losing her incrementally. It might be a few stray hairs listless on the pillow, or the crescents of bitten fingernails tossed behind the headboard, or a dark shape dissolving in soap. As a net is no more than holes tied together, they were bonded by what was no longer there." (ARC p. 63)