Was there ever a trap to match the trap of love?

The shining. It was a good name, a comforting name, because she had always thought of it as a dark thing.

At the time we’re stuck in it, like hostages locked in a Turkish bath, high school seems the most serious business in the world to just about all of us. It’s not until the second or third class reunion that we start realizing how absurd the whole thing was.

For a moment he felt a wild hope: perhaps this really was a nightmare. Perhaps he would awake in his own bed, bathed in sweat, shaking, maybe even crying . . . but alive. Safe. Then he pushed the thought away. Its charm was deadly, its comfort fatal.

I'm seen as somebody who writes for adults because I'm an older man myself. Some of them find me, and a lot of them don't.

The past is obdurate. It doesn't want to change.

And this wasn’t lying, not really. It was leaving out.