So you've been gone a couple days,' Alison said. 'Hmm, what'd you miss...A celebrity did drugs. Politicians disagreed. A different celebrity wore a bikini that revealed a bodily imperfection. A team won a sporting event, but another team lost.

I was surprised. I'd always associated belief in heaven with, frankly, a kind of intellectual disengagement. But Gus wasn't dumb.

Even with everything broken and decided inside her she couldn't quite allow herself to disappear for good.

The miracle and hope of human consciousness is that we can still conceive of boundlessness.

It's a metaphor, see: You put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don't give it the power to do its killing.

Something about me has always liked the drama and inconvience of bad weather. The worse the better, really.

There's no reason whatsoever to drink eight glasses of water a day unless you, for whatever reason, particularly like the taste of water