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It was half the Spanish he knew—stop, I have a shotgun.

Truth, it seems, spills from movies and sitcoms in the wires’ wake.

My sister’s fever wasn’t gone at all, but dazzling—suspended over us.

All my life I have noted that my thinking was atavistic, totemic.

The horror of the waste appalls me. This beauty. This habitation of dream.

For the first two months of class, Toby did barely any writing at all.

She was thinking about what she would say when the time came.

“Aren’t you full of surprises,” Talinda would have said. If she had known.

What better place to write the great American novel than North Africa?

There was a time when all I wanted was go back. Ask all the questions.

I want to dispute that depression is by definition pathological.

When I saw my father for the last time, we both did the same thing.

we are saying thank you in doorways and in the backs of cars

I was once very brave. Once I was very brave. I was very brave once.

He grew a forest of candles and cried when it succumbed to wildfire.

“I’m not afraid of death; I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

When I meet his gaze, he’s frowning, a hint of anger flashing in his eyes. When saw the fury in his eyes, I thought he was going to kill him.

He held a screwdriver to the fleshy underside of Peggy’s neck.

They tried to kill us, my sisters, mother, and me; I still have the scars.

Stopping it, Cye knows, is like stopping a tsunami with a tennis racket.

This is not America! It is not the America I grew up in, it’s
a joke.

There in the trees, swinging from branch to branch, they saw Pete.

He’s clear about his wishes: to die in this house, in his own bed.

If there was any magic in his sad life, it happened on that day.

His mind was a glass vase shat-
tered into pieces across the floor.

“I can’t die, I don’t want to die, I love life,” Prince Andrei thought.

You don’t feel anything when they cut you, not at first, just the blood.

I can’t see a way out of this. Things will not necessarily get better.