From that point of view, I realized that my hole was not miles deep after all. My father, in fact, could stand on the bottom and it only reached up to his chest. Darkness, you know, is relative.

But will you miss me? More importantly - will I miss you? Does either one of us really want to hear the answer to that question?

There is nothing worse than silence, strung like heavy beads on too delicate a conversation.

Maybe the reason I've never died in this story is that I've never had something worth dying for before.

He knew that there was a difference between something that makes you happy and something that doesn’t make you unhappy. The trick was convincing yourself these were one and the same.

Families were never what you wanted them to be. We all wanted what we couldn't have: the perfect child, the doting husband, the mother who wouldn't let go. We live in our grown-up dollhouses completely unaware that, at any moment, a hand might come in and change around everything we'd become accustomed to.

I became a firefighter because I wanted to save people. But I should have been more specific. I should have named names.