Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly

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.

But that was in the days when they expected perils to come from without, and nothing made less sense by that time than a survival room buried in a house itself becoming one big coffin.

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

The only way we know it's true is that we both dreamed it. That's what reality is. It's a dream everyone has together.

Is there anything as incredible as the love story of your own parents? Anything as hard to grasp as the fact that those two over-the-hill players, permanently on the disabled list, were once in the starting lineup? It's impossible to imagine my father, who in my experience was aroused mainly by the lowering of interest rates, suffering the acute, adolescent passions of the flesh.

Some cities have fallen into ruin and some are built upon ruins but others contain their own ruins while still growing.