“I am not dangerous. Only the stories are dangerous. Only the fictions we create, especially when they become expectations.”
“One of the towers has fallen. When it's our turn to leave, it's like something in me is finally willing to listen, and suddenly I understand what it means. The tower doesn't exist anymore. Something I've seen my entire life - something so much larger than my entire life - is gone. That is my first reaction. And then I think about all the people inside. There must have been people inside.”
“The sound of words as they're said is always different from the sound they make when they're heard, because the speaker hears some of the sound from the inside.”
“Here's what I think. We all want someone to build a fort with. We want somebody to swap crayons with and play hide-and-seek with and live out imaginary stories with. We start out getting that from our family. Then we get it from our friends. And then, for whatever reasons, we get it in our heads that we need to get that feeling- that intimacy- from a single someone else. We call if growing up. But really, when you take sex out of it, what we want is a companion. And we make that so damn hard to find.”
“As if when someone close to us dies, we momentarily trade places with them, in the moment right before. And as we get over it, we’re really living their life in reverse, from death to life, from sickness to health.”
“But isn't this a dance? Isn't all of this a dance? Isn't that what we do with words? Isn't that what we do when we talk, when we spar, when we make plans or leave it to chance? Some of it's choreographed. Some of the steps have been done for ages. And the rest -- the rest is spontaneous. The rest has to be decided on the floor, in the moment, before the music ends.”