“I would have rather had a dad with change jingling in his pocket; one who would have spent the last forty minutes of the world raking leaves for his kids to jump in, so that they perished in one loud, bright instant, giggles still bubbling up from their bellies, never suspecting a thing.Yeah, well. Tough luck, rich boy.”

“Mao has never accepted the failure of the "Great Leap". As one of the texts reproduced below demonstrates, he would have preferred to see China perish from famine rather than readjust his own vision or recognize his mistakes.”

“His eyes sparkled again, and in that instant I felt a strong urge to get up and leave him behind. I had been wrong to think what Sean and I had was special. He wasn’t ‘the one’. He couldn’t be. ‘The one’ would never leave me behind.”

“Forever [is] so many different things. It is always changing... it is twenty minutes, or a hundred years, or just this instant, or any instant I wish would last and last”

“If one did not have at least a little luck, one would never survive childhood. But luck can be spent, like money; and lost, like a memory; and wasted, like a life.”

“One day, as My uncle Antonio was heading out to a cantina, I slipped a story I had written into his shirt pocket. It was story about a little boy who would poke his finger with a needle and make it bleed. The boy did it so he would get some attention from his mother. It worked out great for a while. But one day, his mother came into the boy’s room, lifted up his sheets and found the boy’s cold body. The little boy had bled to death. The next morning, I awoke to find a new black and white speckled composition notebook sitting next to my head....”