It was something every child knew how to do, maintain a direct and full connection with the world. Somehow you forgot about it as you grew up, and had to learn it again.

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.

-Who are you, anyway? -Just someone who knows, from personal experience, how attractive it can be to think you can save somebody else by loving them.

Chunks of his life fell away, so that while we were moving ahead in time, he was moving back.

On their best days, writers all over the world are winning Pulitzers, all alone in their studios, with no one watching.

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.

Regret, already sogging me down, burst its dam. It seeped into my legs, it pooled in my heart.