“Enough white lies can scorch the earth black.”

“Can we really choose anything?''Maybe. If we want to bad enough.”

“I can no longer believe in any voodoo spell or laboratory virus. This is something deeper, darker. This comes from the cosmos, from the stars, or the unknown blackness behind them. The shadows in God's boarded-up basement.”

“But we don’t remember those lives. We can’t read our diaries.’ ‘It doesn’t matter. We are where we are, however we got here. What matters is where we go next.’ ‘But can we choose that?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘We’re Dead. Can we really choose anything?’ ‘Maybe. If we want to bad enough.”

“She is everything. And if she is everything, maybe that's answer enough.”

“Deep under our feet the Earth holds its molten breath, while the bones of countless generations watch us and wait.”

“I look down at myself, but I don't need to. I can feel it. My hot blood is pounding through my body, flooding capillaries and lighting up cells like Fourth of July fireworks. I can feel the elation of every atom in my flesh, brimming with gratitude for the second chance they never expected to get. The chance to start over, to live right, to love right, to burn up in a fiery cloud and never again be buried in the mud. I kiss Julie to hide the fact that I'm blushing. My face is bright red and hot enough to melt steel.Okay, corpse, a voice in my head says, and I feel a twitch in my belly, more like a gentle nudge than a kick. I'm going now. I'm sorry I couldn't be here for your battle; I was fighting my own. But we won, right? I can feel it. There's a shiver in our legs, a tremor like the Earth speeding up, spinning off into uncharted orbits. Scary, isn't it? But what wonderful thing didn't start out scary? I don't know what the next page is for you, but whatever it is for me I swear I'm not going to fuck it up. I'm not going to yawn off in the middle of a sentence and hide it in a drawer. Not this time. Peel off these dusty wool blankets of apathy and antipathy and cynical desiccation. I want life in all its stupid sticky rawness.Okay.Okay, R.Here it comes.”