“If you’d bothered to ask me, Clark, if you’d bothered to consult me just once about this so-called fun outing of ours.”

You decided what you thought you’d like me to do, and you went ahead and did it. You did what everyone else does. You decided for me.

Push yourself. Don’t settle. Wear those stripy legs with pride. And if you insist on settling down with some ridiculous bloke, make sure some of this is squirreled away somewhere.

I told him I loved him,” she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. “And he just said it wasn’t enough.” Her eyes were wide and bleak . “How am I supposed to live with that?

Just live well. Just live

Try to write at least 500 words a day. You may ditch 499 of them tomorrow, but you will still be moving forward.

It overwhelmed me and tore at my heart and my stomach and my head and it pulled me under, and I couldn’t bear it. I honestly thought I couldn’t bear it.

I had that. I could almost feel the miles between us shrinking, as if we were at two ends of some invisible elastic thread.

I kissed him, trying to bring him back. I kissed him and let my lips rest against his so that our breath mingled and the tears from my eyes became salt on his skin, and I told myself that, somewhere, tiny particles of him would become tiny particles of me, ingested, swallowed, alive, perpetual.

He smelt of the sun, as if it had seeped deep into his skin, and I found myself inhaling silently, as if he were something delicious.

And then, just like that, my heart broke. My face crumpled, my composure went and I held him tightly and I stopped caring that he could feel the shudder of my sobbing body because grief swamped me.

Just hold on. Just for a minute.” “Are you all right ?” I found my gaze dropping towards his chair, afraid some part of him was pinched, or trapped, that I had got something wrong.

How could you live each day knowing that you were simply whiling away the days until your own death?

You, Clark, have the choice not to let that happen.

I will never, ever regret the things I’ve done. Because most days, all you have are places in your memory that you can go to.

I held him close and said nothing, all the while telling him silently that he was loved. Oh, but he was loved.

I hadn’t realized that music could unlock things in you, could transport you to somewhere even the composer hadn’t predicted. It left an imprint in the air around you, as if you carried its remnants with you when you went.

Yeah, the cut throats and the pigs. But who wants all that blood spilled, judge, huh?

And then you go back like a few days later and then you listen to the movie. And it sort of plays in your mind like a film, like a first rough cut of a movie.

There are probably a few library fines I haven’t paid yet, but I’m a pretty clean-cut guy overall.

It’s very evocative; it’s like a first cut because you hear ‘She walked to the door,’ and you visualize all these things. ‘She opens the door’ . . . because you read the stage directions, too.

A lot of actors choose parts by the scripts, but I don’t trust reading the scripts that much.

Francis Ford Coppola did this early on. You tape a movie, like a radio show, and you have the narrator read all the stage directions.

I ask the American people not to fall victim to disinformation. There are no death panels. The Affordable Care Act cuts the deficit.

It is a voice that cuts you like a razor, but you can still hear the innocence in it, a claim to purity that soars out of the garbage of her throat, carrying evil harmonies.