“I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they'd once belonged to the sea.”

“I think jalapeno sounds like a bunch of letters piling into a beat-up old word to get tacos.”

“She read books quickly and compulsively, paperback after paperback, as if she might drift away without the anchor of the printed page.”

“Honor and duty will ride upon my shoulders till the day I die, like the old man of the sea, who once picked up can never be put dow.”

“Startled, I accidently knock over my inkwell. A black tsunami of ink sprawls out across the page, engulfing the tiny village of my words. They are swept away into the midnight sea. Gone forever. I am bereft.”

“Someone could cut through the mess in our house and look at it like one might look at rings on a tree or layers of sediment. They'd find the black-and-white hairs of a dog we had when I was six, the acid-washed jeans my mother once wore, the seven blood-soaked pillowcases from the time I skinned my knee. All our family secrets rest in endless piles.”