“But, like ivy, we grow where there is room for us.”

“They wordlessly excused each other for not loving each other as much as they had planned to. There were empty rooms in the house where they had meant to put their love, and they worked together to fill these rooms with midcentury modern furniture. ("Birthmark").”

“When I was fifteen, a dark shape came into my room at night. It was dark, but it glowed, which is the first of many facts you will have to tackle with your imagination. It wasn't in the shape of a person, but right away I knew it was like a person in every way except for how it looked. As it turns out, our looks are not the main thing that makes us human.”

“I supposed this was one reason why people got married, to make a fiction that was tellable. It wasn’t just movies that couldn’t contain the full cast of characters — it was us. We had to winnow life down so we knew where to put our tenderness and attention; and that was a good, sweet thing. But together or alone, we were still embedded in a kaleidoscope, ruthlessly varied and continuous, until the end of the end.”

“I wish there were a class where we could just keep going around the circle. around and around, until we had finally said everything about ourselves.”

“Where do we come from? Do souls really exist? I can't answer these questions, especially not at 6am.”

“In an ideal world, we would have been orphans. We felt like orphans and we felt deserving of the pity that orphans get, but embarrassingly enough, we had parents.”