I gave them all the truth and none of the honesty.

Good days, they come around the oddest corners.

Words are good for saying what things are, but sometimes they don't function for what things aren't.

I was fascinated by the lack of a word for a parent who has lost a child. We have no word in English. I thought for sure there'd be a word in Irish but there is none. And then I looked in several other languages and could not find one, until I found the word Sh'khol in Hebrew. I'm still not sure why so many languages don't have a word for this sort of bereavement, this shadowing.

He didn't like it all that much when he first came - all the rubbish and the rush - but it was growing on him, it wasn't half bad. Coming to the city was like entering a tunnel, he said, and finding to your surprise that the light at the end didn't matter; sometimes in fact the tunnel made the light tolerable.

That's what sons do: write to their mothers about recall, tell themselves about the past until they come to realize that they are the past.

The person we know at first, she thinks, is not the one we know at last.