To touch and feel each thing in the world, to know it by sight and by name, and then to know it with your eyes closed so that when something is gone, it can be recognized by the shape of its absence. So that you can continue to possess the lost, because absence is the only constant thing. Because you can get free of everything except the space where things have been.

We search for patterns, you see, only to find where the patterns break. And it’s there, in that fissure, that we pitch our tents and wait.

There were many things they simply didn't talk about: between them, silence was not so much a form of evasion as a way for solitary people to exist in a family.

He died alone because he was too embarrassed to phone anyone.

I take almost no notes when I write. I have one notebook - this old green leather notebook that my dad gave me a decade ago.

Part of me is made of glass, and also, I love you.

In life we sit at the table and refuse to eat, and in death we are eternally hungry.