Well, but you can eat Grandma's cookies. They're not bad for you. They were made by Grandma. Grandma wouldn't hurt you.

I tried to tell myself that it could be worse, that the world was not a wish-granting factory, that I was living with cancer not dying of it, that I mustn't let it kill me before it kills me.

There's your labyrinth of suffering. We are all going. Find your way out of that maze.

And, since they are theater people, they are all talking. All of them. Simultaneously. They do not need to be heard; they only need to be speaking.

As far as I can tell, there are two basic (kissing) rules: 1. Don't bite anything without permission. 2. The human tongue is like wasabi: it's very powerful, and should be used sparingly.

It's not fair," I said. "It's just so goddamned unfair." "The world," he said, "is not a wishgranting factory.

Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death.