And I realized as I walked through the neighborhood how each house could contain a completely different reality. In a single block, there could be fifty seperate worlds. Nobody ever really knew what was going on just next door.

She laughed so easily when she was happy. But also when she was sad.

No matter where I was, my compass pointed west. I would always know what time it was in California.

I almost said, you're not broken, you're just going through something. But i couldn't. She knew. There was something terribly wrong with her, all the way inside. She was like a big diamond with a dead spot in the middle. I was supposed to breathe life into that dead spot, but it hadn't worked.

Nobody had forgotten anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn't like America where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time.

A cliche is like a coin that has been handled too much. Once language has been overly handled, it no longer leaves a clear imprint.

A cliché is like a coin that has been handled too much. Once language has been overly handled, it no longer leaves a clear imprint.