It's not fair," I said. "It's just so goddamned unfair." "The world," he said, "is not a wishgranting factory.

I've read a lot of bad books. I used to review books for a living, and when you're a reviewer you read tons of terrible books.

We fell. We got up. We ran.

In general, watching children's television is a dark and surreal descent into madness where the characters on the screen talk directly to you.

But there are a thousand ways to look at it: maybe the strings break, or maybe our ship s sink, or maybe we're grass--our roots so interdependent that no one is dead as long as someone is still alive. We don't suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters.

Facts, even false ones, cannot be copyrighted.

Even with everything broken and decided inside her she couldn't quite allow herself to disappear for good.