People will do anything, anything, for a really nice laugh.

Once love had seemed like magic. Now it seemed like tricks.

Adults are living increasingly as children: completely in their imaginations. Reading Harry Potter while every newspaper in the country goes out of business. They know so little that is real.

An agony. The exit like the entrance - but reserved. A palindrome: gut-tug.

Forgiveness lives alone and far off down the road, but bitterness and art are close, gossipy neighbors, sharing the same clothesline, hanging out their things, getting their laundry confused.

I don't have a love life. I have a like life.

(Such a life)engaged gross quantities of hope and despair and set them wildly side by side, like a Third World country of the heart.