Once, I asked my mom why stars shine. She said they were night-lights, so the angels could find their way around in Heaven. But when I asked my dad, he started talking about gas, and somehow I put it all together and figured that the food God served caused multiple trips to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

You know, Michael, I used to sit around looking for a way to make sense of what happened, like there was some kind of answer I could find if I just looked hard enough. Then one day I realized that if there had been one, Dave would still be here. And I wondered if this...this feeling that I couldn't figure it all out...was what Dave had been feeling, too.

It's certainly my honor to be able to, hopefully, change the world a tiny bit, one mind at a time.

My mother... she is beautiful, softened at the edges and tempered with a spine of steel. I want to grow old and be like her.

If you have a sister and she dies, do you stop saying you have one? Or are you always a sister, even when the other half of the equation is gone?

Some people don't know what to do with an act of kindness.

That's why we read fiction, isn't it? To remind us that whatever we suffer, we're not the only ones?