It's hard as hell to hold on to your dignity when the risen sun is too bright in your losing eyes, and that's what I was thinking about as we hunted for bad guys through the ruins of a city that didn't exist.

Without Pain, How Could We Know Joy?

Is it still cool to go to the mall?' she asked. 'I take quite a lot of pride in not knowing what's cool,' I answered.

All along — not only since she left, but for a decade before — I had been imagining her without listening, without knowing that she made as a poor a window as I did. And so I could not imagine her as a person who could feel fear, who could feel isolated in a roomful of people, who could be shy about her record collection because it was too personal to share. Someone who might have read travel books to escape having to live in the town that so many people escape to. Someone who — because no one thought she was a person — had no one to really talk to.

I didn't know what to say to her - I was caught in a love triangle with one dead side.

He wasn't perfect or anything. He wasn;t your fairytale prince charming or whatever. He tried to be like that sometimes,but i liked him best when that stuff fell away.

Tiny Cooper is not the world's gayest person, and he is not the world's largest person, but I believe he may be the world's largest person who is really, really gay, and also the world's gayest person who is really, really large.