If you think of even Tolstoy or a book like 'Anna Karenina,' you go from character to character, and each section is from the third person perspective of a different character, so you get to see the whole world a little more kaleidoscopically that way. That's traditional narrative manner, and I haven't done a book like that before, but I enjoyed it.

The trees like lungs filling with air. My sister, the mean one, pulling my hair.

What if you had faith and performed good works, what if you died and went to heaven, and what if all the people you met there were people you didn't like?

Heartbreak is funny to everyone but the heartbroken.

If love were endless, if it were on tap, it wouldn't hit us the way it does. And we certainly wouldn't write about it.

College wasn't like the real world. In the real world people dropped names based on their renown. In college, people dropped names based on their obscurity.

I was beginning to understand something about normality. Normality wasn't normal. It couldn't be. If normality were normal, everybody could leave it alone. They could sit back and let normality manifest itself. But people-and especially doctors- had doubts about normality. They weren't sure normality was up the job. And so they felt inclined to give it a boost.