The seeds of death get lost in the mess that God made us.

Heartbreak is funny to everyone but the heartbroken.

One of the reasons that art is important to me is sometimes it actually feels more coherent than life. It orders the chaos.

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.

This can't be true but I remember it.

On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide- it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese- the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.

Depending on the year or the therapist he was seeing, he'd learned to ascribe just about every facet of his character as a psychological reaction to his parents' fighting: his laziness, his overachieving, his tendency to isolate, his tendency to seduce, his hypochondria, his sense of invulnerability, his self-loathing, his narcissism.