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.

They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.

We had put almost all of our possessions in storage, which was a metaphor for being twenty, as were so many things.

A novel is a daily labor over a period of years. A novel is a job. But a story can be like a mad, lovely visitor, with whom you spend a rather exciting weekend.

She had, without realizing it at the time, learned to follow Nick's gaze, learned to learn his lust...his desires remained memorized within her. She looked at the attractive women he would look at...She had become him: she longed for these women. But she was also herself, and so she despised them. She lusted after them, but she also wanted to beat them up. A rapist. She had become a rapist, driving to work in a car.

This was my modest dream come true: unambitious flight. The kind that never even got high enough for a view.

Surely that was why faith had been invented: to raise teenagers without dying. Although of course it was also why death was invented: to escape teenagers altogether.