I say too much of what, he says too much of everything, too much stuff, too many places, too much information, too many people, too much of things for there to be too much of, there is too much to know and I don't know where to begin but I want to try.

If you listen, you can hear it. The city, it sings. If you stand quietly, at the foot of a garden, in the middle of the street, on the roof of a house. It's clearest at night, when the sound cuts more sharply across the surface of things, when the song reaches out to a place inside you. It's a wordless song, for the most, but it's a song all the same, and nobody hearing it could doubt what it sings. And the song sings the loudest when you pick out each note.

He says when your grandmother died your mother cried solidly for a week, solidly. She was crying with relief he says, it was like as if a door had been unlocked and she'd been let outside, she said to me I'm safe now. He waits, and he says this kid, when it's born, you mustn't ever let it think it's anything other than a gift and a blessing, do you hear me?

It takes a lot of energy and creativity to make such screwed up lives carry on. And the kind of will people have to survive, year after year, dealing with that stuff, is weirdly impressive.

There are so many people in the world, and I want to know them all but I don’t even know my next-door neighbor’s name.

All the emails I get these days start with sorry but I've been so busy, and I don't understand how we can be so busy and then have nothing to say to each other.

Everybodys got their own situation and their own needs.