“Here's a secret: Everyone, if they live long enough, will lose their way at some point. You will lose your way, you will wake up one morning and find yourself lost. This is a hard, simple truth. If...”

“If it had been a heart attack, the newspaper,as if a mountain range had openedinside her, but instead, a light coming onin an empty room. The telephonefell from my shoulder, a black parrot repeatin...”

“Sometimes I'd see my father, walking past my building on his way to another nowhere. I could have given him a key, offered a piece of my floor. A futon. A bed. But I never did. If I let him inside ...”

“The South African artist William Kentridge speaks to this type of certainty: 'To say that one needs art, or politics, that incorporate ambiguity and contradiction is not to say that one then stops ...”

“Ive come to believe that the function of torture in our society is not about getting information, in spite of what we might want to believe. It is merely about power. It tells the world that there ...”

“(2002) In Rome, month upon month, I struggled with how to structure the book about my father (He already had the water, he just had to discover jars). At one point I laid each chapter out on the te...”

“July 24, 6:03 A.M.The laundry was warm and the rafters were firm, and Michael Holzapfel jumped from the chair as if it were a cliff...Michael Holzapfel knew what he was doing. He killed himself for...”

“A book is a suicide postponed.”

“How much can you really trust the promise of a suicidal father?”