There was simply nothing in his experience that even compared with the thrill of killing to protect his family. In this moment, it was the purpose of his existence. He felt, possibly for the first tim...
There is a part of me that never left that room in Fallujah that smelled like rancid blood.
Their affair had been three of the most intense, reckless, terrifying, happy, alive months of his life. Like how he imagined being on heroin felt if the high never ended, if every syringe didn’t also...
The greenest grass he’d ever seen—a forest of long, soft blades—ran down to the bank. The water was clear and swift as it flowed between the boulders that jutted out of the channel. Across the river,...
The day wears on. The light fades. It snows harder with each passing hour. Up and down Main, Christmas lights wink on.
The box isn’t all that different from life. If you go in with fear, fear is what you’ll find.
That's not the way the human heart works. I can't just amputate what I feel.
Sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to. Why? Because they’re the right things.
Since the Industrial Revolution, we’ve treated our world like it was a hotel room and we were rock stars. But we aren’t rock stars.
She’s cut off by a burst of fire and a muted report not quite as loud as a naked gunshot.
She took me in when I was lost. When the world stopped making sense.
She just witnessed her own murder.
Scream until the drug took her. 5 They started arriving after four o’clock in the afternoon. By five, Rachael’s disappearance was the lead story on all the local news stations, even in Tucson and Phoe...
Perhaps once he had been a good clown. A noble clown. But he’d stolen Randall’s chainsaw, and had to die.
Never saw our friends or family. We were forced to marry. That didn’t turn out so bad, she said. Bob held his tongue as he drove through the heart of the curve.
Life with a cheat code isn’t life. Our existence isn’t something to be engineered or optimized for the avoidance of pain. That’s what it is to be human—the beauty and the pain, each meaningless withou...
Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.
Life is nothing how he expected it would be when he was young and living under the delusion that things could be controlled. Nothing can be controlled. Only endured.
Jack Kilborn, author of Trapped, Afraid, and Endurance.
I’ve always known, on a purely intellectual level, that our separateness and isolation are an illusion. We’re all made of the same thing—the blown-out pieces of matter formed in the fires of dead star...