"Please stop," I said. "You're upsetting the black Santas."

One of the jobs of a writer is to add nuance and ambiguity to that straight line that people often draw to very specific kinds of heroism. Most of us don't get to be Snooki. For most of us heroism has to be in our everyday lives.

This was what I liked most about my friends: just sitting around & telling stories.

still, what could i say? that i didn't just feel depressed - instead, it was like the depression was the core of me, of every part of me, from my mind to my bones? that if he got blue, i got black? that i hated those pills so much, because i knew how much i relied on them to live?

While I did not fancy myself a particularly good person, I never thought my first real sexual action would be prostitutional.

It looked like an old painting, but real - everything achingly idyllic in the morning light - and I thought about how wonderfully strange it would be to live in a place where almost everything had been built by the dead.

It must be some book," she said as she knelt down next to the bed..."Did that boy give it to you?" She asked out of nowhere. "By 'it' do you mean herpes?" "You are too much," Mom said, "The book, Hazel. I mean the book.