We are inscrutable even to ourselves, I suppose.

There’s an intimacy in listening to somebody’s lies, I’ve always thought–you learn more about someone from the things they wish were true than from the things that actually are.

Well, we spent enough on gymnastics.”Christ, did we,’ said Maureen. ‘So many lessons.’So many lessons, it was true: art and music and ice-skating; Lily’s every fleeting interest enthusiastically, abundantly indulged. Not to mention the many...

The city had seemed grand to him once … it had once had a certain clarity. When you’re young you think it’s the clarity that’s intoxicating; later you realize you were only ever drunk on...

That’s an applicable life less, my boy,’ he’d said. ‘Nobody is really paying attention to you. Most people don’t really get this. They think they must count more to other people than other people count...

When my father wrote about fate, I think he was writing about the reality that is, when there are so many other realities that could have been.

But I find something compelling in the game’s choreography, the way one move implies the next. The kings are an apt metaphor for human beings: utterly constrained by the rules of the game, defenseless against...

It was bewildering, the way that reality could be overtaken, wrestled down, and murdered by the sheer weight of possibility.

I think the only way to properly face doom is to be on time.

Forgiveness was work, Eduardo told victims’ families–but so, then, was love, and deciding what was right, and defending it. Recusing yourself from judgment so you won’t be tainted by the aggressor’s sin is the same...

He could hear his knees crack, and it made him feel old. You had to live so terribly long to actually be old, but Sebastien was starting to wonder if people began to feel that...

Sadness, forever unacknowledged, eventually becomes resentment.

I will admit it sometimes felt strange to me to make the confession to someone and later catch them laughing, or flirting, or eating a sandwich, instead of tearing at the injustice of it all...

Sometimes there are things we don’t understand even about ourselves. Sometimes we run out of the time to keep trying to unravel them, and we have to sit back and content ourselves with a shrug....

And anyway, the anticipation was always worse than the thing itself – the anticipation and the memory, of course. And the anticipation of the memory was maybe the worst part of all.

My father had a healthy disregard for social conventions: he once let me paint the house windows in rainbows with my watercolor set, to my mother’s horror, and he’d clap for trees that he thought...