We got off at the next exit, quietly, and, switching drivers, we walked in front of the car. We met and I held him, my hands balled into tight fists around his shoulders, and he wrapped his short arms around me and squeezed tight, so that I felt the heaves of his chest as we realized over and over again that we were still alive. I realized it in waves and we held on to each other crying and I thought, 'God we must look so lame,' but it doesn't matter when you have just now realized, all the time later, that you are still alive.

There is only one things in this world shittier than biting it from cancer when you're sixteen, and that's having a kid who bites it from cancer.

Boys are much more likely to objectify girls bodies, while boys are seen by girls as whole people.

That's how writing works, at least for me: even the stuff that doesn't work out gets funneled into the stuff that does work out.

The pleasure isn't in doing the thing, the pleasure is in planning it.

The labyrinth blows, but I choose it.

Traveling, I am finding, teaches you a lot of things about yourself. For instance, I never thought myself to be the kind of person who pees into a mostly empty bottle of Bluefin energy drink while driving through South Carolina at seventy-seven miles per hour - but in face I am that kind of person.