“Meanwhile, Jess and I looked like we had rats burrowed in our hair and since we both fell asleep without taking off our makeup, we had racoon eyes to go with it - not exactly beauty queens.”

“When we got close to the door, I moved him to the side, so we couldn't be seen from the window, and I pulled him towards me by his shirt.”

“What... Are you on strike from wearing deodorant now too? You smell like a boy's locker room after a wrestling match!”

“Oh, hi, Ben," I tried to sound casual, but my head started pounding, my palms started sweating, and the butterflies were doing Zumba in my stomach.”

“Conversations are efforts toward good relations. They are an elementary form of reciprocity. They are the exercise of our love for each other. They are the enemies of our loneliness, our doubt, our anxiety, our tendencies to abdicate. To continue to be in good conversation over our enormous and terrifying problems is to be calling out to each other in the night. If we attend with imagination and devotion to our conversations, we will find what we need; and someone among us will act—it does not matter whom—and we will survive.”

“She has to live, Eliott. I owe her a lifetime of apologies.”“Sometimes I think that’s all we owe our parents.”

“We keep each other alive with our stories. We need to share them, as much as we need to share food. We also require for our health the presence of good companions. One of the most extraordinary things about the land is that it knows this—and it compels language from some of us so that as a community we may converse about this or that place, and speak of the need.”