“I stare into a thin, web-like crack above the urinal's handle and think to myself that if I were to disappear into that crack, say somehow miniaturize and slip into it, the odds are good that no one would notice I was gone. No... one... would... care. In fact some, if they noticed my absence, might feel an odd, indefinable sense of relief. This is true: the world is better off with some people gone. Our lives are not all interconnected. That theory is crock. Some people truly do not need to be here.”

“This is true: the world is better off with some people gone. Our lives are not all interconnected. That theory is crock. Some people truly do not need to be here.”

“Our lives are not all interconnected. That theory is a crock. Some people truly do not need to be here.”

“As a young girl I thought, with fervent hope, that ten years was some kind of magic formula. That if I were seventeen instead of seven, I would know how to handle myself better in a situation. That a passing decade would fill in all the cracks where I ached, by adding wisdom or, at the very least, understanding.”

“You see, Novelka, in an odd sort of way, some of our strongest relationships are with people who have died. We miss the person, we think of them, we wonder what they would want us to do, how they would want us to act. Though they are not here, they still strongly influence our lives. And so we go on loving them, sometimes even more, when they are gone.”

“I got to thinking that poems were like people. Some people you got right off the bat. Some people you just didn't get--and never would get.”