I'm having so much trouble with writing. Maybe if I help other people, it'll be easier for me.

It's never the changes we want that change everything.

Clavo saca clavo. Nothing sacas nothing, you reply. No one will ever be like her.

You keep waiting for the heaviness to leave you. You keep waiting for the moment you never think about the ex again. It doesn't come.

I came up under [Ronald] Reagan and under [George] Bush, and what are we to do now? We are here to fight. People can run off all they want. But for me, [Donald] Trump is already in the Dominican Republic.

Instead of lowering your head and copping to it like a man, you pick up the journal as one might hold a bady's beshattered diaper, as one might pinch a recently benutted condom. You glance at the offending passages. Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel. This is how you lose her.

She would be a new person, she vowed. They said no matter how far a mule travels it can never come back a horse, but she would show them all.