…all I knew were novels. It gave me pause, for a moment, that all my reference points were fiction, that all my narratives were lies.

By then there had been other men. She’d flung herself at other closed windows. The windows never broke, but her heart, at the end, was in splinters.

And second, everyone is so weird, but they’re all completely accepted. It’s like, okay, you have a pumpkin head, and that guy’s made of tin, and you’re a talking chicken, but what the hell, let’s...

The whole damn century would’ve made more sense backwards. Where we ended is worse than where we began.

Very few writers thank their mothers for keen editorial insight; I’m happy to be the exception.

We aren’t haunted by the dead, but by the impossible reach of history. By how unknowable these others are to us, how unfathomable we’d be to them.

If everything else were still the same, he’d have felt Zee’s absence like a gaping hole. But if he could continue to reconfigure his entire life, there would be no missing place where Zee had...