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

You could hear the wind in the leaves, and on that wind traveled the screams of the kids on the playground in the distance, the little kids figuring out how to be alive, how to navigate a world that was not built for them by navigating a playground that was. . . Who am I to say that these things might not be forever? Who is Pete Van Houten to assert as fact the conjecture that our labor is temporary? All I know of heaven and all I know of death is in this park: an elegant universe in ceaseless motion, teeming with ruined ruins and screaming children.

... I didn't know whether to feel angry at her for making me part of her suicide or just to feel angry at myself for letting her go.

She left me enough to rediscover the Great Perhaps.

I wouldn’t have a career if it weren’t for independent bookstores.

But it was only hot outside, and generally I only walked outside between one air-conditioned place to another.

The challenge is the same whether or not I'm collaborating: to empathize with your reader and to tell a story that will matter to him or her. But the mechanics of going about that challenge change when you're collaborating, because you have someone to help refine your thinking and expand your vision of what might happen.