Everybody knows the competing identities of people who have kids.

She was so beautiful, like someone who you will never meet, but always dream of meeting, like someone who is too good for you.

Books are for those without real lives, he thought. And they are no real replacement.

He was someone whom everyone admired and liked but whom nobody knew. He was like a book that you could feel good holding, that you could talk about without ever having read, that you could recommend.

The paper, the stapler, the staples, the tape. It makes me sick. Physical things. Forty years of loving someone becomes staples and tape.

I can forgive you for leaving, but not for coming back.

And so it was when anyone tried to speak: their minds would become tangled in remembrance. Words became floods of thought with no beginning or end, and would drown the speaker before he could reach the life raft of the point he was trying to make. It was impossible to remember what one meant, what, after all of the words, was intended.