I feel the fear, but I walk fast toward it.

Do we spend most of our days trying to remember or to forget? Do we spend most of our time running towards or away from our lives?

Our footsteps run, and I don't want them to end. I want to run and laugh and feel like this forever. I want to avoid any awkward moment when the realness of reality sticks its fork into our flesh, leaving us standing there, together. I want to stay here, in this moment, and never go to other places, where we don't know what to say or what to do.

When she came to write her story, she would wonder when the books and the words started to mean not just something, but everything.

It's not the place, I think. It's the people. We'd have all been the same anywhere else.

In the basement of 33 Himmel Street, Max Vandenburg could feel the fists of an entire nation. One by one they climbed into the ring to beat him down. They made him bleed. They let him suffer. Millions of them - until one last time, when he gathered himself to his feet.

When I was growing up, I wanted to be a house painter like my father, but I was always screwing up when I went to work with him. I had a talent for knocking over paint and painting myself into corners. I also realized fairly quickly that painting bored me.