Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person's face as you pass them on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street, and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you.

It was a small thing, but it was a thing, and things have a way of either dying or growing, and it wasn’t dying.

The word God asks a question and then answers it before there is any chance to wonder.

Did you ever really love her? Not really no. But me? Yes. Even though I have no pizzazz?

Maybe that's why people take pictures of themselves, to avoid being described.

It was a real whale, a photograph of a real whale. I looked into its tiny wise eye and wondered where that eye was now. Was it alive and swimming, or had it died long ago, or was it dying now, right this second? When a whale dies, it falls down through the ocean slowly, over the course of a day. All the other fish see it fall, like a giant statue, like a building, but slowly, slowly.

I steeled myself against laughter; I would rather die than laugh. I didn’t laugh, I did not laugh. But I died, I did die.