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

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

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)

Nothing, she now knew, could be defined in exclusion, and every bug, pencil, and grass blade was a dictionary in itself, requiring the definitions of all things to fulfill its own.

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.

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

Sleep just a while longer, that's it, where else can you go where you neither suffer nor cause suffering.