People, I thought, wanted security. They couldn't bear the idea of death being a big black nothing, couldn't bear the thought of their loved ones not existing, and couldn't even imagine themselves not existing. I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn't bear not to.

It always shocked me when I realized that I wasn’t the only person in the world who thought and felt such strange and awful things.

So you've been gone a couple days,' Alison said. 'Hmm, what'd you miss...A celebrity did drugs. Politicians disagreed. A different celebrity wore a bikini that revealed a bodily imperfection. A team won a sporting event, but another team lost.

Tuesday—we had school for the first time. Madame O’Malley had a moment of silence at the beginning of French class, a class that was always punctuated with long moments of silence, and then asked us how we were feeling. “Awful,” a girl said. “En français,” Madame O’Malley replied. “En français.

I said nothing—I hadn’t known Marya, and anyway, “listening quietly” was my general social strategy

We are now as I wished we could be then.

Becoming a father made me much more interested in the parent character in my novels. I've never found parents that interesting.