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.

If nobody speaks of remarkable things, how can they be called remarkable?

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.

Last week I was just someone who had had a first novel published.

I wonder how many ways there are for a mother to produce that wreckage in her own daughter, and my muscles tense as I think of them.

He thinks about her, at this moment, in her house, a few thin walls away, packing her life into boxes and bags and he wonders what memories she is rediscovering, what thoughts are catching in her mouth like the dust blown from unused textbooks. He wonders if she has buried any traces of herself under her floorboards. He wonders what those traces would be if she had. And he wonders again why he thinks about her so much when he knows so little to think about.

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.