“Family tragedies had a way of smashing everything apart and then gluing it all back together. The problem was no one ever knew how long the glue would hold.”

“There was no going back to the way things were, because all you ever got was the way things are.”

“Through pictures, we cut reality in pieces. We selected only the choicest moments, discarding the rest as if they'd never happened.”

“But I knew he wouldn't kiss me. Not tonight. Not like this. There was too much between us now, all the words and near misses. All the potential, the alternate futures that would stretch out before ...”

“You ask me why Im nice to you, he said. Why, why, why. But you dont ask me stuff that matters. Who I am or where I been. What I see when I look at you. What I want.”

“They say you can never step into the same river twice. And maybe that's how it was for Papi now, memories shifting and re-forming soundlessly beneath him while the rest of us sat on the shore and w...”

“As dawn leaks into the sky it edits out the stars like excess punctuation marks, deleting asterisks and periods, commas, and semi-colons, leaving only unhinged thoughts rotating and pivoting, and u...”

“I pace the shallow sea, walking the time between, reflecting on the type of fossil Id like to be. I guess Id like my bones to be replaced by some vivid chert, a red ulna or radius, or maybe preserv...”

“I sit watching until dusk, hypnotized. I think of the sea as continually sloshing back and forth, repetitive, but my psyche goes with the river- always loping downhill, purposeful, listening only t...”

“Any man's a fool who lets himself be a wage-earning slave, today.”

“If love is like a possession, maybe my letter are like my exorcisms”

“I had fallen too far. I was in love with Rush Finlay.”

“Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.”

“Wherever forests have not been mowed down, wherever the animal is recessed in their quiet protection, wherever the earth is not bereft of four-footed life - that to the white man is an 'unbroken wi...”

“Earth is the holiest place in the Universe, loving the earth, and loving life is the way to generate positive vibrations.”