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

No," I said. And maybe it was only because Alaska couldn't hit the brakes and I couldn't hit the accelerator.

... she called it a paper town. Like, you know, everything so fake and flimsy.

She said Robert Joyner had killed himself with a gun. And then I asked why, and then she told me that he was getting a divorce and was sad about it.' 'Lots of people get divorces and don't kill themselves,' I said. 'I know,' she said, excitement in her voice. 'That's what I told her.

She cannot possibly be dead, people do not just die

There is always the risk: something is good and good and good and good, then all at once it gets awkward.

And he found himself thinking that maybe stories don't just make us matter to each other - maybe they're also the only way to the infinite mattering he'd been after for so long.