“She expected a lot of me. When I was in fourth grade working on a book report, she made me start the whole thing over when she read it and said it was barely even legible. "What's wrong with it?" I...”

“This is what I'm supposed to be doing this summer. This is how I'm supposed to be passing my days. Figuring out the secret to how she was the most joyful person when she was dying. Because I'm livi...”

“When someone you love has died, there is a certain grace period during which you can get away with murder. Not literal murder, but pretty much anything else.”

“Do you need anything?" she asks. A mom A dad. Someone. Anyone. Can you arrange for that? "Nah, I'm good.”

“Get away from my house and all its rooms that echo, all the rooms I don't enter anymore.”

“I don't tell her that my grasp on truth, on words, on people, has slipped. I was getting close, so close to normal again, and that's been snatched away. I'm not even back where I started. I'm somew...”

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of wi...”

“My dear,Find what you love and let it kill you.Let it drain you of your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness.Let it kill you and let it devour your remains....”

“If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn't be filled?”

“It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.”

“If I am going to be drownedif I am going to be drownedif I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and t...”

“I'm an Earth ecstatic, and my creed is simple: All life is sacred, life loves life, and we are capable of improving our behavior toward one another. As basic as that is, for me it's also tonic and ...”

“All words are pegs to hang ideas on.”

“A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.”

“No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake....”