This is one of those things that you can never explain to anyone; that’s what I want to explain – one of those free-association moments with connections that dissolve when you start to try to...

Outside, the sleet had gotten thicker. You could hear it pebbling against the large glass windows, you could see it swirling wildly through the spotlights of street lamps. It was the kind of night when...

The desire to remake that shrinking expanse of life they were still allotted, to make use of it, to fill it up with possibility. Oh please: one more transformation.

He had built his own future brick by brick around himself but there were no doors or windows, at least that was the way it seemed at the time he had thought to himself, I...

I can’t understand how people can settle for having just one life. I remember we were in English class and we were talking about that poem by – that one guy. David Frost. ‘Two roads...

I guess I always thought it would be bigger, when a terrible thing happened. Didn’t you think so? Doesn’t it seem like houses ought to be caving in, and lightning and thunder, and people tearing...

We leave such a trail of bodies through our teens and twenties that it’s hard to tell which one is us. How many versions do we abandon over the years

You could say that they were sweet, or you could say that they were something out of a horror movie.

That night I sat up writing in my diary writing to Big Me: ‘I hope you are alive ‘ I wrote. ‘I hope that I don’t die before you are able to read this.

There is a stage you reach, Deagle thinks, a time somewhere in early middle age, when your past ceases to be about yourself. Your connection to your former life is like a dream or delirium,...

She looked at me as if I might be one of them a spy from the world of the ignorant.

A conclusion is simply the place where you got tired of thinking.

I’ve been talking to myself a lot lately. I don’t know what that’s about, but my mother was the same way. She hated to make small talk with other people, but get her into a...

Her name…was Mrs. marina Orlova, and she had grown up in Siberia. Later, she would tell him that she loathed the American custom of constantly smiling: “They are like chimpanzees,” she said, in her bitter...

Hesitantly, I touched the stump where my finger used to be. In my mind, something almost remembered itself, but the fumes of turpentine were making me a little lightheaded; whatever memory was on the verge...

I guess,” says Deagle, finally, “I’ll just have a pack of Marlboro Lights. That’s what I used to smoke when I was human.

You really romanticize the white-trash period of your life,’ Rain once said to me, which I thought was a little hurtful but perhaps true.

There is your car and the open road, the fabled lure of random adventure. You stand at the verge, and you could become anything. Your future shifts and warps with your smallest step, your shitty...

problems” with writing are just puzzles, and they can be interesting to try to crack, even when it’s frustrating.

Even when our death is imminent, we carry the image of ourselves moving forward, alive, into the future.

Here is the door of my mom’s house, well-remembered childhood portal. Here is the yard, and a set of wires that runs from the house to a wooden pole, and some fat birds sitting together...

The true terror Jonah thought the true mystery of life was not that we are all going to die but that we were all born that we were all once little babies like this unknowing...

You want a child because it is a link in the bridge that you are building between the past and the future, a cantilever that holds you, so that you are not alone.

Beth had been a middle school science teacher and Joni was a librarian and they both had collections of weird stuff they had found. Bizarre, misspelled letters written by lovelorn eighth graders. Obscene Polaroids left...

It had occurred to him that if the undead don’t realize that they are dead, he might easily be one of them himself.