The only way my head was going truly somewhere else was to travel to a different life and not a different airport.

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.

We'd been assured it wouldn't be painful, though she might experience 'discomfort,' a term beloved of the medical profession that seems to be a synonym for agony that isn't yours.

You can call it innocence, or you can call it gullibility, but Celia made the most common mistake of the good-hearted: she assumed that everyone else was just like her.

The good life doesn't knock on the door. Joy is a job.

Got nothing to do with trying. You like someone, or you don't. If you're 'trying', you don't.

Change is like that: you are no longer where you were; you are not yet where you will get; you are nowhere exactly.