Americans refused to see accidents as accidental. They did not comprehend they while tragedy always exacts a formidable price, it rarely incurs a debt.

I, too, seem to be a connoisseur of rain, but it does not fill me with joy; it allows me to steep myself in a solitude I nurse like a vice I’ve refused to vanquish.

I’d rather be pleasantly surprised than fatally disappointed.

I’d suffocate. From my own cowardice.

Ready how? Who’s ever ready for anything important?

To love me, my family does not need to understand me.

To have children is to plant roses, muguets, lavender, lilac, gardenia, stock, peonies, tuberose, hyacinth …it is to achieve a whole sense,a grand sense one did not priorly know. It is to give one’s garden...

When it comes to life, we spin our own yarn, and where we end up is really, in fact, where we always intended to be.

Clever how the cosmos can, in a single portent, be ingratiating yet sadistic.

I come from a culture of handwringers, vengeance seekers, people who name children after ancestors by rote — first child, paternal grandfather, second child, maternal, and on and on and on.