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I must tell you what it is like to be human, or you will drift away.

Her last relationship was with Elsa’s Instagram, truth be told. If Elsa is going to accept her follower invite, it needs to look believable. You did a bad thing, she thinks, and this is what you get.

We had run out of every necessity. You name it, we didn’t have it.

I let you pull my hair, throw me to the rocks, disarrange me.

That late afternoon in the park, with its kiss, wasn’t an ending or a beginning; it was both. The piano had been a great bird rustling and swooping in the vast space.

A plus B; a child in peril, plus love, dissolution of, equals a story.

I build our life together as I want it to be.

What excuse did I use to pick a fight with that arrogant poet?

A child no bigger than small change calls from her window j’ai faim.

Years ago I wanted parallel lives, to see how it turns out for all of me.

There’s nowhere he can kiss where she hasn’t been kissed by the sun.

Soon everything here will be sopped up by time. Only art will last.

The walls pull apart like a troubled couple, finally deciding to hold.

This is the stupid math of loving another human being.

Let’s rummage through each other’s bodies like a blowout sale.

He was just a bully, uncivilized, out of control, and wanting to lash out.

He was just a bully, uncivilized, out of control, and wanting to lash out.

Her biggest secret was Jay Currie—her white American boyfriend.

You don’t know what it’s like to be so hungry that you’d steal to eat.

At Walden Pond, Henry Thoreau clicks like on the “Wilderness” page.

Dainty morsels do not fail to attract gentlemen as well as ladies.

Like lions in cages, women like me dream . . . of freedom . . .

Youth! Goodness! Joy! Hope! Strange things to bring to a place like this.

i silenced with my hands the loud wet thing that would not let me sleep

I bled. God didn’t want to hear about it. He said unclean and so it was.

Tobias Wolff reading two stories aloud: "Say Yes" and "Her Dog."

i learned to save lives from a man who reminded me of my father

I walked that land with him, one and mingling, breaking into breath.

“You’re going somewhere now,” he said. “Up to the big smoke.”

We cannot leave it to the forces to rub out the color of the world.