What isn't said is as important as what is said.

Pain could be killed. Sadness could not, but the drugs did shut its mouth for a time.

New York City in life was much like New York City in death. It was still hard to get a cab, for example.

I want to keep growing as a writer. I find myself doing unexpected projects and sort of challenging my idea of where I am in my career, or what I'm supposed to be doing. In fact, I'm not supposed to be doing anything. Just finding projects that are challenging to me. I want to be a writer who keeps growing and figuring out new things and hopefully people will follow me along as I publish these things.

For years I felt that I wasn't ready to take on slavery. It's a huge topic, and I didn't want to mess it up.

Best to let the broken glass be broken glass, let it splinter into smaller pieces and dust and scatter. Let the cracks between things widen until they are no longer cracks but the new places for things. That was where they were now. The world wasn't ending: it had ended and now they were in the new place. They could not recognize it because they had never seen it before.

If I have three ideas and I'm working on one more than the others, that sort of tells me that I should work on that one.