“You're waiting because you thought it would follow, you thought there would be some logic, perhaps, something to pull it all together but here we are in the weeds again, here we are in the bowels of the thing: your world doesn't make sense.”

“A man walks into a bar and says: Take my wife–please. So you do. You take her out into the rain and you fall in love with her and she leaves you and you’re desolate.You’re on your back in your undershirt, a broken man on an ugly bedspread, staring at the water stains on the ceiling. And you can hear the man in the apartment above you taking off his shoes.You hear the first boot hit the floor and you’re looking up, you’re waiting because you thought it would follow, you thought there would be some logic, perhaps, something to pull it all together but here we are in the weeds again, here we arein the bowels of the thing: your world doesn’t make sense. And then the second boot falls. And then a third, a fourth, a fifth. A man walks into a bar and says: Take my wife–please. But you take him instead.You take him home, and you make him a cheese sandwich, and you try to get his shoes off, but he kicks you and he keeps kicking you. You swallow a bottle of sleeping pills but they don’t work. Boots continue to fall to the floor in the apartment above you.You go to work the next day pretending nothing happened. Your co-workers ask if everything’s okay and you tell them you’re just tired. And you’re trying to smile. And they’re trying to smile.A man walks into a bar, you this time, and says: Make it a double. A man walks into a bar, you this time, and says: Walk a mile in my shoes.A man walks into a convenience store, still you, saying: I only wanted something simple, something generic… But the clerk tells you to buy something or get out.A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river but then he’s still leftwith the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away but then he’s still left with his hands.”

“Here I am in a rabbit run, here I am in a valley of pine, waiting for you to find me. I could pretend I’m speaking to everyone—assume a middle distance and transcend myself—but I’m taking to you and you know it.”

“Here I amleaving you clues. I am singing now while Romeburns. We are all just trying to be holy. My applejack,my silent night, just mash your lips against me.We are all going forward. None of us are going back.”

“For a while I thought I was the dragon.I guess I can tell you that now. And, for a while, I thought I was the princess,cotton candy pink, sitting there in my room, in the tower of the castle, young and beautiful and in love and waiting for you withconfidence but the princess looks into her mirror and only sees the princess,while I’m out here, slogging through the mud, breathing fire, and getting stabbed to death. Okay, so I’m the dragon. Big deal. You still get to be the hero.You get magic gloves! A fish that talks! You get eyes like flashlights!”

“Hello, darling. Sorry about that. Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwell and how I ruined everything by saying it out loud. Especially that, but I should have known. You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together to make a creature that will do what I say or love me back.”

“There’s smashed glass glittering everywhere like stars. It’s a Western,Henry. It’s a downright shoot-em-up. We’ve made a graveyardout of the bone white afternoon.It’s another wrong-man-dies scenario, and we keep doing it Henry,keep saying until we get it right … but we always win and we never quit.See, we’ve won again,here we are at the place where I get to beg for it, where I get to say Please,for just one night, will you lie down next to me, we can leave our clothes on,we can stay all buttoned up …But we both know how it goes—I say I want you inside me and you holdmy head underwater. I say I want you inside me and you split me openwith a knife.”