...I will continue to underscore that I don't think authorial intent is all that important to a reading experience, and I certainly don't think the job of reading is to divine authorial intent.

Maybe 'okay' will be our 'always

My regret was immediate and permanent and useless.

Caring doesn't sometimes lead to misery. It always does.

So dawn goes down today... Nothing gold can stay. -- Robert Frost

I am crying, he thought, opening his eyes to stare through the soapy, stinging water. I feel like crying, so I must be crying, but it's impossible to tell because I'm underwater. But he wasn't crying. Curiously, he felt too depressed to cry. Too hurt. It felt as if she'd taken the part of him that cried.

Shame about how we’re gonna die here, though. I mean, seriously. An Arab and a half-Jew enter a store in Tennessee. It’s the beginning of a joke, and the punch line is “sodomy’’.