You are mine. I recognize you. We twist our souls around each other's miseries. It is that which makes us family.

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.

A good mixtape didn't just gather together a bunch of love songs, but instead created an emotional narrative specific to your affection. The stories in most of my favorite collections are collected more like songs on a mixtape than, say, collected like spare change. By which I mean they are in conversation with each other and work to become larger than their parts.

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

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

Invader and invaded held on to their fistfuls of earth, but in the end, the earth outlived the hands that held it.

Entire years had passed when he was rich enough in time to disregard the loose change of a minute, but now he obsessed over each one, this minute, the next minute, the one following, all of which were different terms for the same illusion.