You can't out-travel sadness. I travel not to get away from my troubles but to see how they look in front of famous buildings

but you can't spend your whole life hoping people will ask you the right questions. you must learn to love and answer the questions they already ask.

truthfully, this is the fabric of all my fantasies: love shown not by a kiss or a wild look or a careful hand but by a willingness for research. i don’t dream of someone who understands me immediately, who seems to have known me my entire life, who says, i know me too. i want someone keen to learn my own strange organization, amazed at what’s revealed; someone who asks, and then what, and then what?

Can I tell you something? It wasn't so bad. Not so bad at all right then, me scowling at the dirt, James in his bed, the way it always always was. Look, if that's all that happened, if his dying just meant that I would be waiting for him to say something instead of listening to him say something, it would have been fine.

And while I was not an admirer of people in the specific, I liked them in the abstract. It is only the execution of the idea that disappoints.

All I can say is, it's a sort of kinship, as though there is a family tree of grief. On this branch, the lost children, on this the suicided parents, here the beloved mentally ill siblings. When something terrible happens, you discover all of the sudden that you have a new set of relatives, people with whom you can speak in the shorthand of cousins.

It's a happy life, but someone is missing. It's a happy life, and someone is missing.