Do you know why most survivors of the Holocaust are vegan? It's because they know what it's like to be treated like an animal.

There's no way you can get the past right. You can pretend. You can delude yourself, but you can't re-create what's over.

His saliva tasted like the wet dicks of ten thousand lonely truck drivers.

When we die, these are the stories still on our lips. The stories we’ll only tell strangers, someplace private in the padded cell of midnight. These important stories, we rehearse them for years in our head but never tell. These stories are ghosts, bringing people back from the dead. Just for a moment. For a visit. Every story is a ghost.

This is why I loved the support groups so much, if people thought you were dying, they gave you their full attention. If this might be the last time they saw you, they really saw you. Everything else about their checkbook balance and radio songs and messy hair went out the window. You had their full attention. People listened instead of just waiting for their turn to speak. And when they spoke, they weren't just telling you a story. When the two of you talked, you were building something, and afterward you were both different than before.

It takes a lot to get people talking in airplanes. But once they start talking, you just can't shut them up.

I've been choking to death for years. By now this should be easy.