Why are terms of endearment always food? Honey, cookie, sugar, pumpkin. Its not like caring about someone is enough to actually sustain you.

If you focus on sandbagging the beachhead, you can ignore the tsunami that's approaching. Try it any other way and you'll go crazy.

You can't look back - you just have to put the past behind you, and find something better in your future.

When you don't fit in, you become superhuman. You can feel everyone else's eyes on you, stuck like Velcro. You can hear a whisper about you from a mile away. You can disappear, even when it looks like you're still standing right there. You can scream, and nobody hears a sound. You become the mutant who fell into the vat of acid, the Joker who can't remove his mask, the bionic man who's missing all his limbs and none of his heart. You are the thing that used to be normal, but that was so long ago, you can't even remember what it was like.

The night is falling down around us. Meteors rain like fireworks, quick rips in the seam of the dark... Every second, another streak of silver glows: parentheses, exclamation points, commas - a whole grammar made of light, for words too hard to speak.

I learned a lot that night. For example, that part of being the magician's assistant means coming face-to-face with illusion. That invisibility is really just knotting your body in a certain way and letting the black curtain fall over you. That people don't vanish into thin air; that when you can't find someone, it's because you've been misdirected to look elsewhere.

We make messes of our lives, but every now and then, we manage to do something that's exactly right. The challenge is figuring out which is which.