How am I supposed to let you go, that's all I'm asking. I want to hold you again, smell you, and, yes too, I just want you to fade. To please, please fade.

I won the parental lottery. Most of the kids I grew up with either came from really fractured homes, or really violent ones. I went home to a very traditional, good Irish Catholic family.

I held her, he wanted to say, and if I knew for certain that all it would take to hold her again would be to die, then I couldn't raise the gun to my head fast enough.

The brain controls pain. It controls fear. Sleep. Empathy. Hunger. Everything we associate with the heart or the soul or the nervous system is actually controlled by the brain. Everything. What if you could control it?

The loneliness of another can be shocking when it lays itself bare without warning.

But I often think we talk way too much in this society, that we consider verbalization a panacea that it very often is not, and that we turn a blind eye to the sort of morbid self-absorption that becomes a predictable by-product of it.

I believe so deeply in the primacy of language, in lifting your prose to the highest level you're capable of and making your words symphonic.