It was the first time that we had sort of articulated our major problem. She wanted to die and I wanted her to live and we were enemies who loved each other.
Is it wrong to trust in a beautiful lie if it helps you get through life?
I think Ray might have wanted a son. One night when I was seven or eight I announced to my family that I wanted to play hockey with the boys on Friday nights and Ray became just a little too eager. Ok...
I stood there, like always, like forever it seemed, in the middle of the road waiting for something or someone to retrieve me, God or a parent or my husband or any of those things or people or ideas o...
I find it curious that she hasn't been excommunicated. Are her small acts of rebellion a convenient outlet for Peters, a type of performance that satisfies the colonists' need to assert themselves, an...
He got up to put on a record, vinyl was his thing now. He liked the step-by-stepness of it, the process. He held the record the way people hold records, not with his fingers but with his palms. He ble...
Go into hard things quickly, eagerly, then retreat.
But love, like a mushroom high compared with the buzz from cheap weed, outlasts grief.
Wild was the worst thing you could become in a community rigged for compliance.
Things shouldn’t hinge on so very little. Sneeze and you’re highway carnage. Remove one tiny stone and bang, you’re an avalanche statistic. But I guess if you can die without ever understanding how it...
That to truly know happiness is to know the fleeting nature of everything, joy, pain, safety and happiness itself.
Surely, she says, encouraging others to lie on our behalves must be a worse sin than lying ourselves.
She went sideways through the doorway and her stomach grazed the man’s penis. Then she stopped in the middle, right there between the man and the woman, she didn’t hurry through at all, she was savour...
Perhaps we need to know more specifically what we are fighting to achieve (not only what we are fighting to destroy), and what actions would be required for such an achievement, even after the fight h...
People here just can't wait to die, it seems. It's the main event. The only reason we're not all snuffed at birth is because that would reduce our suffering by a lifetime.
Later that evening I lay down in Min's empty bed upstairs and pulled her white sheet up over my head. I felt for my kneecaps and hip bones. I lay perfectly still, arms down, palms up. I closed my eyes...
It’s hard to grieve in a town where everything that happens is God’s will. It’s hard to know what to do with your emptiness when you’re not supposed to have emptiness.
If, along the way, something is gained, then something will also be lost.
I sat on my Dad's bed and flipped through the page after empty page. No stamps. No exotic locales. No travel-worn smudges or creases. Just the ID information and my mother's black and white photo whic...
I learned another thing, which is that just because someone is eating the ashes of your protagonist doesn't mean you stop telling the story.