Every year, the memories I have of my father become more faint, unclear, and distant. once they were vivid and true, then they became like photographs, and now they are more like photographs of photographs.

Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.

In nature forms are endlessly being destroyed and then recreated and destroyed and recreated. Nature isn't afraid to destroy forms in the process of regenerating. So why are we afraid of that in life?

Obviously I've been reading Kafka for a long long time, since I was really young, and even before I ever read him I knew who he was. I had this weird sense that he was some kind of family. Like Uncle Kafka. Now I really think of him that way, the way we think about an uncle who opened up some path for being in a family that otherwise wouldn't have existed. I think of him that way as a writer and a familial figure.

I scowled at the world. And the world scowled back. We were locked in a stare of mutual disgust.

. . . she gave him one of those broad smiles she reserved for strangers, as if she were aware of being able to pass, in their eyes, for an ordinary woman.

I won't waste your time with the injuries of my childhood, with my loneliness, or the fear and sadness of the years I spent inside my parents' marriage, under the reign of my father's rage, afer all, who isn't a survivor from the wreck of childhood?