In the big picture I write for an audience of people I've never met. By the final draft I'm looking for anything in the prose that's prospectively boring to strangers.

...some people coddle their own afflictions the way others spoil small pedigreed dogs with cans of pate.

Desire is one of the burning experiences of human life.

For the living, death is thievery.

I didn't care about anything. And there's a freedom in apathy, a wild, dizzying liberation on which you can almost get drunk. You can do anything. Ask Kevin.

The discovery that heartbreak is indeed heartbreaking consoles us about our humanity.

You were ambitious - for your life, what it was like when you woke up in the morning, and not for some attainment. Like most people who did not answer a particular calling from an early age, you placed work beside yourself; any occupation would fill up your day but not your heart. I liked that about you. I liked it enormously.