While working in advertising, I channelled my creative energy into elaborate escape fantasies: cake making, dog breeding, the Peace Corps.

Life is absolutely horrific, leading up to absolute horror.

A piano might fall on your head, he said, but it also might not. And in the meantime you never know. Something nice might happen.

it was love, of course, though I didn't know it then and Finn was both its subject and object. He accepted love instinctively, without responsibility or conditions, like a wild thing glimpsed through trees.

I guess there was a war going on somewhere in the world that night but it wasn't one that could touch us.

I was pretty far gone, but not so far gone that I thought anyone with half a toehold in reality would think what we were doing was a good idea.

I frightened myself. I became the ghost Piper was so scared of.