Memory has a heavy backspin, yet it’s still impossible to land exactly where we took off.

I write about what I know; and I write about things that are new to me, and that I didn't know before.

Cynicism is easy. An optimist is a braver cynic.

With all respects to heaven, I like it here.

That was the sort of everyday love I had to learn to contend with: if you grow up with it, it's hard to think you'll ever match it. I used to think it was difficult for children of folks who really loved each other, hard to get out from under that skin because sometimes it's just so comfortable you don't want to have to develop your own.

This is not my life. These are not my cobwebs. This is not the darkness I was designed for.

It had never occurred to me before but everything in New York is built upon another thing, nothing is entirely by itself, each thing as strange as the last, and connected.