Linda was nine then, as I was, but we were in love...it had all the shadings and complexities of mature adult love and maybe more, because there were not yet words for it, and because it was not yet fixed to comparisons or chronologies or the ways by which adults measure such things...I just loved her. Even then, at nine years old, I wanted to live inside her body. I wanted to melt into her bones -- that kind of love.

I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.

Fiction, maybe art in general, is a tentative, uncertain enterprise; it's not science, it's an exploration, but you never find much in the way of answers.

What happened, and what might have happened?

And as a writer now, I want to save Linda's life. Not her body--her life.

They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity.

Laughter does not deny pain. Laughter - like a wail - acknowledges and replies to pain.