We twist our souls around each other’s miseries.

But there had to be a quota. An upper limit to the number of miracles one is privileged to in a lifetime. How many times can a beloved reappear?

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

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.

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

In my own work, humor is necessary, for the reasons stated above, but also because forbidding your characters silliness, absurdity, irony, and vulgarity forbids them aspects of the human experience every bit as universal as sorrow.

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.