Or so we don't think about how we're just vulnerable specks trying to survive on a violent, tumultuous planet, at the mercy of hurricanes and volcanoes and asteroids and terrorists and disease and a million other things. We concentrate on having little thoughts so we don't have BIG THOUGHTS. . . . You've got to ignore the one big truth - life is fatal.

When you raise an animal, you live it like your own child.

An untold story has a weight that can submerge you, sure as a sunken ship at the bottom of the ocean.

This is not to say I don’t feel my own grief, which can hit powerfully at unexpected times. It’s just that the telling does not automatically bring on my own upset, as people assume. I deal more with their reaction than they do with mine, and so you have to choose your timing.

But an apology too — you think you’re giving something, but you’re not. You’re really asking for something. You’re asking for forgiveness, you’re asking for the other injured person to make it okay for you. Apologies were harder work for the person getting one than the person giving one.

Too often in my life, love has been defined as "humiliation with occasional roses".

Maybe it was wrong, or maybe impossible, but I wanted the truth to be one thing. One solid thing.