Now all the mute objects of my life seem to tell my story, to stretch back in time, if I look closely enough.

Bubble gum angels swooped from top margins or scraped their wings between teeming paragraphs, maidens with golden hair dripped sea blue tears into the books spine, grape-colored whales spouted blood around a newspaper item (pasted in) listing arrivals to the endangered spieces list. Six hatchlings cried from shattered shells near an entry made on Easter. Cecilia had filled the pages with a profusion of colors and curlicues, candyland ladders and striped shamrocks.

We're all made up of many parts, other halves. Not just me.

Every novelist should possess a hermaphroditic imagination.

I'm hopefully making the reader feel a lot about the characters and then about their own life.

We listened to them, but it was clear they'd received too much therapy to know the truth.

We Greeks are a moody people. Suicide makes sense to us. Putting up Christmas lights after your own daughter does it--that makes no sense. What my yia yia could never understand about America was why everyone pretended to be happy all the time.” -Mrs. Karafilis