But it was only hot outside, and generally I only walked outside between one air-conditioned place to another.

And on the last day, the bad days become so difficult to recall, because one way or another, she had made a life here, just as I had. The town was paper, but the memories were not. All the things I’d done here, all the love and pity and compassion and violence and spite, kept welling up inside me.

We landed, in fact, parallel to a canal, like there were two runways: one for us and one for waterfowl.

The beautiful thing about driving was that it stole just enough of his attention - car parked on the side, maybe a cop, slow to speed limit, time to pass this sixteen-wheeler, turn signal, check rearview, crane neck to check blind spot and yes, okay, left lane.

I stood under the awning for a moment, but finally I decided that being in a bad mood with your friends beats being in a bad mood without them.

The way we still essentializ, we're constantly essentializing people as merely poor, or merely other, and in the end you can't have a relationship with people. I think the biggest job of adulthood is to learn to imagine other people complexly.

Colin's skin was alive with the feeling of connection to everyone in that car and everyone not in it. And he was feeling not-unique in the very best possible way.