I was more alone than if I had been alone.

In America right now, we use words like 'smart' to talk about bombs. American rhetoric is grounded in ideas of capital-G Good, capital-E Evil, and it's very clear who is on which side. But in a book you can do just the opposite. You can use all lower-case words.

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.

I wanted to hit him. I wanted to hold him. I wanted to shout myself into his ear.

One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family.

So she had to satisfy herself with the idea of love - loving the loving of things whose existence she didn't care at all about. Love itself became the object of her love. She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for. It was not the world that was the great and saving lie, but her willingness to make it beautiful and fair, to live a once-removed life, in a world once-removed from the one in which everyone else seemed to exist.

I wish my days could be washed away like the chalk lines of my days.