Who would you die for? Who would you wake up at five forty-five in the morning for even though you don't even know why he needs you?

The prospect of a world that contains neither humans nor Z's is not so terrifying. Nature will take its world back. Animals will frolic and fight. There will be no lord of the manor, which is not such a bad thing, because it seems to me that people have done a pretty poor job of guiding the biosphere for the last few thousand years.

Can I ask you about Caroline Mathers?" "And you say there's no afterlife.

Shame about how we’re gonna die here, though. I mean, seriously. An Arab and a half-Jew enter a store in Tennessee. It’s the beginning of a joke, and the punch line is “sodomy’’.

It is easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined.

The dead are visible only in the terrible lidless eye of memory.

She taught me everything I knew about crawfish and kissing and pink wine and poetry. She made me different.