when you [lose someone], it feels like the hole in your gum when a tooth falls out. You can chew, you can eat, you have plenty of other teeth, but your tongue keeps going back to that empty place, where all nerves are still a little raw

He gently touched his mother's cheek, felt her sorrow slip over his fingertips.

But mostly I wondered why the head could move so swiftly while the heart dragged its feet. I still loved him. It felt like anything else permanent that has gone missing; a lost tooth, a severed leg. You might know better, but that doesn’t keep your tongue from poling at the hole in your gum, or your phantom limb from aching.

Sometimes Chris wished he could sneak a peek at the back of the book, so to speak, and see how it was all going to turn out, so that he wouldn't have to bother going through the motions.

Witness testimony is always flawed. It's better than circumstantial evidence, sure, but people aren't camcorders; they don't record every action and reaction, and the very act of remembering involves chosing words, actions and images. In other words, any witness who was supposed to be giving a court facts is really just giving them a version of fiction.

The book that made me want to be a writer in the first place was Gone with the Wind - I read it and wanted to create a whole world out of words, too.

But if you seek forgiveness, doesn't that automatically mean you cannot be a monster? By definition, doesn't that desperation make you human again?