He may be a malevolent sorcerer, but Tiny Cooper is his own goddamned man, and if he wants to be a gigantic skipper, then that's his right as a huge American.

I think when you're 16, if you have good parents, they generally just fade in the background. I had great parents, and because they were great, I thought very little about them in high school.

I couldn't hear a thing in the world but you. And it was so cold then, and so silent, and I loved you so much. Now it's hot and dead quiet again, and I love you still.

That's why people grow weary of listening to Dumpees obsess over their troubles: getting dumped is predictable, repetitive, and boring. They want to stay friends; they feel smothered; it's always them and it's never you; and afterward, you're devastated and their relieved; it's over for them and just starting for you.

Imagining isn't perfect. You can't get all the way inside someone else...But imagining being someone else, or the world being something else, is the only way in. It is the machine that kills fascists.

And then I was asleep. That deep, can-still-taste-her-in-my-mouth sleep, that sleep that is not particularly restful but difficult to wake up from all the same.

The times that were most fun seemed always to be followed by sadness now, because it was when life started to feel like it did when she was with us that we realized how utterly gone she was.