I looked at everyone and wondered where they came from, and who they missed, and what they were sorry for.

She felt as if she were brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release.

In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that.

She said, "Do you have more things that you need, or more that you don't need?" I said, "It depends on what it means to need.

We spent our lives making livings.

She wanted nothing more than someone to miss, to touch, with whom to speak like a child, with whom to be a child.

Or perhaps a widow found him and took him in: brought him an easy chair, changed his sweater every morning, shaved his face until the hair stopped growing, took him faithfully to bed with her every night, whispered sweet nothings into what was left of his ear, laughed with him over black coffee, cried with him over yellowing pictures, talked greenly about having kids of her own, began to miss him before she became sick, left him everything in her will, thought of only him as she died, always knew he was fiction but believed in him anyway.