Sometimes no length of string is long enough to say the thing that needs to be said. In such cases all the string can do, in whatever its form, is conduct a person's silence.

I read like an animal. I read under the covers, I read lying in the grass, I read at the dinner table. While other people were talking to me, I read.

I was never a man of great ambition I cried too easily I didn't have a head for science Words often failed me While others prayed I only moved my lips

Then he almost but didn't say the two sentence he'd been meaning to say for years: part of me is made of glass, and also, I love you

Our kiss was niticlimactic. It wasn't that the kiss was bad, but it was just a note of punctuation in our long conversation, a parenthetical remark made in order to assure each other of a deeply felt agreement, a mutual offer of companionship, which is so much more rare than sexual passion or even love.

The clarity was startling and Samson wondered whether he was imagining these moments. Not that they hadn't happened at all, but that they had been embellished by details from elsewhere, fragments that survived the obliteration of other memories, vagrant data that gravitated and stuck to what was left to remember. But in the end he rejected this idea. The memories were too perfect: take one detail away and they collapsed into disorder.

Franz Kafka is dead. He died in a tree from which he wouldn't come down. "Come down!" they cried to him. "Come down! Come down!" Silence filled the night, and the night filled the silence, while they waited for Kafka to speak. "I can't," he finally said, with a note of wistfulness. "Why?" they cried. Stars spilled across the black sky. "Because then you'll stop asking for me."