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

The truth is the thing I invented so I could live.

I forced myself to picture the last moments. The penultimate breath. A final sigh. And yet. It was always followed by another.

Sometimes I forget that the world is not on the same schedule as I. That everything is not dying, or that if it is dying it will return to life, what with a little sun and the usual encouragement.

For me, what I am making in the novel is a place to live. When I first switched from poetry to novels, I was asked why, and the metaphor I came up with was about poems as rooms. You can make a room perfect, but then you have to shut the door and never go back, whereas a novel is like a house - it can never be perfect, but you can make a life in it.

There's no match for the silence of GOD.

There are so many ways to be alive, but only one way to be dead.