You still know that boy. He was very angry at fourteen, fifteen, in summer and winter, at home or in the world. So angry that his face contorted in photos. The camera was a question...

They took my mother’s stomach out six months ago.

The Earth is an animal that shakes off its fleas when they dig too deep, bite too hard.

Dear Producers, Something is radiating deep within me and it must be transmitted or I will implode and the world will suffer a great loss, unawares. Epic are the proportions of my soul, yet without...

The issue is complex, but like many matters in Sudan, it is not as complex as Khartoum would want the west to believe.

But everyone disappears, no matter who loves them.

The country he had left thirty years ago had been a realistic place. There were political realities there, then and now, that precluded blind faith, that discouraged one from thinking that everything, always, would work...

Through the small tall bathroom window the December yard is gray and scratchy, the tree calligraphic.

Everyone in the life before was cranky, I think, because they just wanted to know.–After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned

The raising of a child is the building of a cathedral. You can’t cut corners.

It’s kind of cute, the IV bag.

My mind, I know, I can prove, hovers on hummingbird wings. It hovers and it churns. And when it’s operating at full thrust, the churning does not stop. The machines do not rest, the systems...

He was warm, partly because he had on many layers, and partly because boys whoa re part wolf and part wind do not get cold.

We have advantages. We have a cushion to fall back on. This is abundance. A luxury of place and time. Something rare and wonderful. It’s almost historically unprecedented. We must do extraordinary things. We have...

We are unusual and tragic and alive.

This was a new skill she’d acquired, the ability to look, to the outside world, utterly serene and even cheerful, while, in her skull, all was chaos.

There’s nothing to be gained from passive observance, the simple documenting of conditions, because, at its core, it sets a bad example. Every time something is observed and not fixed, or when one has a...

Americans are born knowing everything and nothing. Born moving forward, quickly, or thinking they are.

Did children want sports cars for parents? No. They wanted Hondas. They wanted to know that the car would start in all seasons.

What can I do for you, my man?

Suffering is only suffering if it’s done in silence, in solitude. Pain experienced in public, in view of loving millions, was no longer pain. It was communion.

His lies were so exquisite I almost wept.

I mean, all this stuff you’re involved in, it’s all gossip. It’s people talking about each other behind their backs. That’s the vast majority of this social media, all these reviews, all these comments. Your...

If you don’t want anyone to know about your existence, you might as well kill yourself. You’re taking up space, air.

We are all feeding from each other, all the time, every day.

People are strange, but more than that, they’re good. They’re good first, then strange.

Love is implicit in every connection. It should be. Thus when absent it makes us insane. (You Shall Know Our Velocity)

Why do you want to be on The Real World?-Because I want everyone to witness my youthWhy?-Isn’t it gorgeous?

I am myself a failed cartoonist,

You can’t ever guess at life, at pain. All pain is real, and all pain is personal. It’s the most personal thing we have. It eats each of us differently.

No. There is no balance, and no retribution, and no rules. The rules and balances you blather about are hopeful creations of a man fearing death.

When you’re in your twenties in a new city where no one’s from here, we’re all sort of orphans. The only people that you can count on our bunch of people that you work with...

When my parents passed on, and we read their wills, we discovered something we didn’t at all expect, especially from our devoutly Catholic mother: they had both left instructions that their bodies be donated to...

I was feeling everything much too much. Everything was pulling at my eyes. I spent hours floating in pools. I sat on terraces and stared for afternoons at mediocre views. I was feeling overjoyed for...

It’s our theory that everything trickles down from there, … That if you have high salaries, good conditions, you have good support. You have a lot of communication between teachers, you pay for teachers’ supplemental...

People say I talk slowly. I talk in a way sometimes called laconic. The phone rings, I answer, and people ask if they’ve woken me up. I lose my way in the middle of sentences,...

Oh I could be out, rollicking in the ripeness of my flesh and others’, could be drinking things and eating things and rubbing mine against theirs, speculating about this person or that, waving, indicating hello...

I am myself a failed cartoonist, There are a million reasons to ruin things.

I worry about exposing him to bands like Journey, the appreciation of which will surely bring him nothing but the opprobrium of his peers. Though he has often been resistant – children so seldom know...

Books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: Let’s not forget this.

Why shouldn’t your curiosity about the world be rewarded?

Not that there seems to be any appropriate place to bury someone, but these municipal cemeteries, or any cemetery at all for that matter, like the ones by the highway, or the ones in the...

I was born into a town and a family and the town ad my family happened to me. I own none of it. It is everyone’s. It is shareware. I like it, I like having...

The kids sit facing the white board and collectively tell a story, … As they’re coming up with the story, there’s a typist sitting here, so they see their words coming up on the wall.