It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.

Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?

Everybody who undergoes a death and finds themselves grieving is obsessed with — or maybe overly focused on — the idea that they can’t display self-pity, they have to be strong. Actually there are a lot of reasons why you are going to feel sorry for yourself, but that’s your first concern.

The last sentence in a piece is another adventure. It should open the piece up.

Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.

You have your wonderful memories," people said later, as if memories were solace. Memories are not. Memories are by definition of times past, things gone. Memories are the Westlake uniforms in the closet, the faded and cracked photographs, the invitations to the weddings of the people who are no longer married, the mass cards from the funerals of the people whose faces you no longer remember. Memories are what you no longer want to remember.

I did consider marriage and motherhood extreme and doomed commitments. Not out of any experience of them as such, but it was simply the way I looked at things.