I do realize that the reader needs some form of resolution. Sometimes I think of it almost like writing a musical score where things have to harmonize and certain lines have to come to a close.

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.

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.

Perhaps that is what it means to be a father - to teach your child to live without you.

I wished to punish her for her intolerable stoicism, which made it impossible for me to ever be truly needed by her in the most profound ways a person can need another, a need that often goes by the name of love.

I'm very interested in structure, how multiple stories are assembled in different ways; that is what memory does as well.

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