“Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly.”

Feeding my children is not like feeding myself: it matters more.

I can forgive you for leaving, but not for coming back.

He was someone whom everyone admired and liked but whom nobody knew. He was like a book that you could feel good holding, that you could talk about without ever having read, that you could recommend.

What does it remember like?

I took the world into me, rearranged it, and sent it back out as a question: “Do you like me?

We shared the smile of recognizing ourselves in each other, how many imposters do I have? Do we all make the same mistakes, or has one of us gotten it right, or even just a bit less wrong, am I the imposter?

My wife and I have chosen to bring up our children as vegetarians. In another time or place, we might have made a different decision. But the realities of our present moment compelled us to make that choice.

With writing, we have second chances.

Sadness of not knowing enough words to [express what you mean].

Why are you leaving me? He wrote, I do not know how to live. I do not know either but I am trying. I do not know how to try. There were some things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So i buried them and let them hurt me

Please be truthful, but also please be benevolent, please.

Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled.

I thought for a minute, and then I got heavy, heavy boots.

Everything I did, I did because I thought it was the correct thing to do, I am not a hero, it is true, But I am not a bad person, either.

He promised us that everything would be okay. I was a child, but I knew that everything would not be okay. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father.

Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don’t mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine.