Here is the boy, drowning.

...the lesson of forever and ever is that knowing a man's mind ain't knowing the man.

You can't say everything, so you don't say nothing.

You love him," he says. Not an asking, just a fact. "I do," I say. Also a fact.

Sometimes people need to lie to themselves most of all.

Stories are the wildest things of all. Stories chase and bite and hunt.

The green things of this world are just wondrous, aren’t they?” his mother went on. “We work so hard to get rid of them when sometimes they’re the very thing that saves us.