I spend my time dwelling on revenge and try to deal with the monsters crawling out of the ashes.

There will never come a time when I will be able to resist my emotions.

I was the sort of kid who spent a Sunday afternoon prying little trees out of the foundation of his parents' house. I should have given in to the inevitable truth that this was the sort of person I would become, in the end, but I kept fighting it.

It kills your writing if you try to manipulate it with crude politics.

He despised his body for its boring hungers, reflex anger; its petty, obliterating rage. But now he'd become detached. He regarded his body with a tender regret. It was the thing his spirit had to haul.

...Grandpa's mind had left us, gone wild and wary. When I walked with him I could feel how strange it was. His thoughts swam between us, hidden under rocks, disappearing in weeds, and I was fishing for them, dangling my own words like baits and lures.

Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness.