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.

Just breathing can be such a luxury sometimes.

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

Everyone loves a witch hunt as long as it's someone else's witch being hunted.

It's no accident that most self-help groups use 'anonymous' in their names; to Americans, the first step toward redemption is a ritual wiping out of the self, followed by the construction of a new one.

A writer has a use for his experiences that most civilians simply don't; he or she discerns material in situations that others simply live through. Perhaps there are some who disapprove of this, but without this double consciousness, literature would not get made at all.

Art, art of any kind, shows that folks are trying.