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

...precisely where the land touched water at high tide, where things came together but also separated.

He had an opinion of himself, I think, that was too high for his own good. Or maybe it was the reverse. Maybe it was a low opinion that he kept trying to erase.

I was a coward. I went to the war.

By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain.

Life is never all one thing. It bounces around. Certainly, my own life has.

...his love was too much for him, he felt paralyzed, he wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and be smothered.