He'd fought hard, Lida told me, as if there was another way to fight.

Random questions are the least random of all questions.

I like the strings. I always have. Because that's how it feels. But the strings make pain seem more fatal than it is, I think. We're not as frail as the strings would make us believe. And I like the grass, too. The grass got me to you, helped me to imagine you as an actual person. But we're not different sprouts from the same plant. I can't be you. You can't be me. You can imagine another well – but never quite perfectly, you know?

My stomach sank. JP had come so close. His immigrant parents had sacrificed so much.

I knew that time would now pass for me differently than it would for him - that I, like everyone in that room, would go on accumulating loves and losses while he would not. And for me, that was the final and truly unbearable tragedy: Like all the innumerable dead, he'd once and for all been demoted from haunted to haunter.

We have this weird thing in the world where you don't get insulted for what you do, you get insulted for who you are.

I kept waiting for that loneliness and nervousness to make me want to go back. But it never did.