But there's so much to do: cigarettes to smoke, sex to have, swings to swing on.

It's not life or death, the labyrinth. Suffering. Doing wrong and having wrong things happen to you. That's the problem. Bolivar was talking about the pain, not about the living or dying. How do you get out of the labyrinth of suffering?

But to be perfectly frank, this childish idea that the author of a novel has some special insight into the characters in the novel ... it's ridiculous. That novel was composed of scratches on a page, dear. The characters inhabiting it have no life outside of those scratches. What happened to them? They all ceased to exist the moment the novel ended.

The funny thing about writing is that whether you're doing well or doing it poorly, it looks the exact same. That's actually one of the main ways that writing is different from ballet dancing.

You may choose your song, but know this: Tiny. Cooper. Hates. Over. The. Rainbow.

Last words are always harder to remember when no one knows that someone's about to die.

But it was sure a privilege to love him, huh?" I nodded into his shirt. "Gives you an idea how I feel about you," he said. My old man. He always knew just what to say.