Mostly we're motivated to control ourselves in public. Mostly. At home the motivation is much less clear. At home there's a bit of a lab for bad behavior. You can test things out without terrible consequences. Or maybe the consequences are there, but they are deferred, buried, much harder to detect.

Slamming the book shut produces a wind on the face, a weather that is copyrighted by the author, and this wind may not be deployed without permission, nor may the pages be turned without express written permission.

I always, at least back then, struggled with emotion in writing. I felt like I could do odd, unusual things, but there wouldn't be enough feeling in them, and maybe if there's a progression at all to anything that I've done it's that I've always wanted to have a high - an almost overwhelming - degree of feeling in what I write.

It's lonely to listen to the pleasure of others, not that I've made a habit of that kind of eavesdropping. There's joy and passion in the next room, in the next bed, but it's not yours.

Without sound, celebration and grief look nearly the same.

Among other things, autoimmune disorders are an induction into a world of unstable information and no reliable expertise.

A self needed to spill out sometimes, a body should show evidence of what the hell went on inside it.