If you want to be a writer, you write. Everybody wants to get published. You gotta play your long game.

What an awful thing then, being there in our house together with our daughter gone, trying to be equal to so many sudden orders of sorrow, any one of which alone would have wrenched us from our fragile orbits around each other.

If you want to be a writer, you write. Everybody wants to get published. You gotta play your long game.

When his grandchildren had been little, they had asked if they could hide inside the clock. Now he wanted to gather them and open himself up and hide them among his ribs and faintly ticking heart.

I worry that if whatever pops into your head at any instant immediately goes online, you lose the crucial time for your thoughts to simmer and evolve and build up nuance, depth and empathy.

There is my father whispering in my ear, Be still still still. And yet you change everything. What was the marsh like, waiting for the storm before you came and kneeled in the water? It was nothing. Watch after you leave the water, now cold and regretful, miles from home, certain of the belt on your backside, the cold shoulder, the extra chores; watch. Watch the water heal itself of your presence--not to repair injury but to offer itself again should you care to risk another strapping [...].

Light changes, our eyes blink and see the world from the slightest difference of perspective and our place in it has changed.