“I want to be someone making music/with my coming.”

“I knew what slant of light would make you turn over. It was then I felt the highways slide out of my hands. I remembered the old men in the west side cafe, dealing dominoes like magical charms.”

“I love the solitude of reading. I love the deep dive into someone else's story, the delicious ache of a last page.”

“Making a FistFor the first time, on the road north of Tampico,I felt the life sliding out of me,a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.I was seven, I lay in the carwatching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin."How do you know if you are going to die?"I begged my mother.We had been traveling for days.With strange confidence she answered,"When you can no longer make a fist."Years later I smile to think of that journey,the borders we must cross separately,stamped with our unanswerable woes.I who did not die, who am still living,still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,clenching and opening one small hand.”

“We dropped our troubles into the lap of the storyteller, and they turned into someone else's.”

“It was terrible when a single conversation with someone determined your whole future relationship.”

“I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,but because it never forgot what it could do.”