“When you're alone, you are in the right place to watch sadness approach like storm clouds over an open field. You can sit in a chair and get ready for it. As it moves through you, you can reach out your hands and feel all the edges. When it passes and you can drink coffee again you even miss it because it has been loyal to you like a boyfriend.”

“I am bad at asking for help. When you ask a human being for help, there is a chance they will say later, Remember when you asked for help? Can I have five dollars? That goes for medicine, too. I don't like asking help from pills in a bottle. I don't want to be woken up at night by a tab of aspirin asking to borrow five dollars.”

“That can be the cruelest part of happiness--its tendency to disguise itself as boredom.”

“Once in a while, I smell Clive on my skin and it stops my day. It's a train crossing; I wait to pass. Eventually the lights stop flashing, the barriers lift. I keep moving.”

“We stand at the doors and look out over the yard. Hundreds of deer gaze back at us. Deer and deer and deer and deer and deer. Their blue chests heave in the dark. Their trembling cotton throats.”

“I am quitting a boy like some people quit smoking. I am not quitting smoking.”

“I was fond of him immediately, in the way we feel kinship to those who compliment us.”