Tim O'Brien's book about Vietnam, The Things They Carried, has won every award, is studied in college and is considered to be definitive. But it's fiction.

I love to be surprised or challenged or told that I know less than I thought that I knew. I know it's an old saw, but the older I get the less I know I know.

Then he got more books. He saved all the books.

The house is a factory.

People say I talk slowly. I talk in a way sometimes called laconic. The phone rings, I answer, and people ask if they've woken me up. I lose my way in the middle of sentences, leaving people hanging for minutes. I have no control over it. I'll be talking, and will be interested in what I'm saying, but then someone-I'm convinced this what happens-someone-and I wish I knew who, because I would have words for this person-for a short time, borrows my head. Like a battery is borrowed from a calculator to power a remote control, someone, always, is borrowing my head.

Once a year, she remembers that she is insignificant. Then she forgets agains, because more than she is insignificant, she is forgetful.

I had the sensation that I might always be running like this, that I would always have to run, and that I would always be able to run.