“I used to sit in front of my father's Jag, watching the raindrops run their kamikaze suicide missions from one edge of the windshield to the wiper blade.”

“My chest feels full of glitter and helium, the way it used to when I was little and riding my father's shoulders at twilight, when I knew that if I held up my hands and spread my fingers like a net, I could catch the coming stars.”

“I used to pretend that I was just passing through this family on my way to my real one.”

“From that point of view, I realized that my hole was not miles deep after all. My father, in fact, could stand on the bottom and it only reached up to his chest.Darkness, you know, is relative.”

“I used to stand in front of the mirror in the bathroom to see what they were staring at. I wanted toknow what made their heads turn, what it was about me that was so incredibly different. At first Icouldn’t tell. I mean, I was just me.Then one day, when I looked in the mirror, I understood. I looked into my own eyes and I hatedmyself, maybe as much as all of them did.That was the day I started to believe they might be right.”

“When I was little I bragged about my firefighting father: my father would go to heaven, because if he went to hell he would put out all the fires”

“My grandmother told me that her father used to ask her a riddle: What must you break apart in order to bring a family close together?Bread, of course.”