Other people's devotions embarrassed me, perhaps because, like other people's kisses, they rarely looked genuine when viewed too closely.

Short stories are fiction's R & D department, and failed or less-than-conclusive experiments are not just to be expected but to be hoped for.

What was more humiliating, I wondered: having to beg for someone's cold chicken bones or being offered them?

The lines we draw that make us who we are are potent by virtue of being non-negotiable, and even, at some level, indefensible.

Some strangers become more important to you than family, maybe because you're not expected to love them. You can leave them whenever you want to. They can, too. Every moment together is a choice.

The most beautiful faces have some ugly in them.

We're all impostors to ourselves. By that I mean that we know instinctively, intimately, the difference between whom we are inside and who we appear to be to others. Most of the time - when we aren't flat lying about something or playing a particularly stylized role in some heightened dramatic situation - this difference between the internal and the external is modest and manageable.