The existence of other people is essentially awkward.

No eleven-year-old has any real grasp of death. He doesn't have any real concept of other people--that they feel pain, even that they exist. And his own adult future isn't real to him, either. Makes it that much easier to throw away.

I thought at the time that I couldn't be horrified anymore, or wounded. I suppose that's a common conceit, that you've already been so damaged that damage itself, in its totality, makes you safe.

Built like an oak tree, against which I could pitch my pillow and read; mornings, I could curl into the crook of your branches.

For women, marriages foreclosed often resulted in an accumulation of booty; for men, these failed projects of implausible optimism were more likely to manifest themselves in material lack. It was hard to resist the metaphorical impression that women got to keep the past itself, whereas men were simply robbed of it.

Secrets bind and separate in strict accordance with who's in them .

Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.