When the clock stops on a life, all things emanating from it become precious, finite, and cordoned off for preservation. Each aspect of the dead person is removed from the flux of the everyday, which, of course, is where we miss him most. The quarantine around death makes it feel unlucky and wrong--a freakish incursion--and the dead, thus quarantined, come to seem more dead than they already are.... Borrowing from the dead is a way of keeping them engaged in life's daily transactions--in other words, alive.

Redemption, transformation--God how she wanted these things. Every day, every minute. Didn't everyone?

There's a fine line between thinking about somebody and thinking about not thinking about somebody, but I have the patience and the self-control to walk that line for hours - days, if I have to.

And the question is, which one is really "you.

It's turning out to be a bad day, a day when the sun feels like teeth.

We live in a moment and a culture when reading is really endangered. There's simply no way to write well, though, if you're not reading well.

Real computers scared me; if you can find Them, then They can find you.