“I guess we're really brothers, aren't we? Don't know what that means, except it means that some of the same things we remember.”

“I drank some chocolate milk and then lay down on the sofa in my “living” room, not really sad, just floating; trying to imagine what it was to be dead. Nothing much came to me. I remember closing my eyes and whispering her name, trying to make her come back. As we stared at each other, neither of us moving, I felt some...thing go shut in my heart while something else swung open”

“But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget.”

“What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again.”

“And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.”

“Most of this I've told before, or at least hinted at, but what I have never told is the full truth. How I cracked. How at work one morning, standing on the pig line, I felt something break open in my chest. I don't know what it was. I'll never know. But it was real, I know that much, it was a physical rapture--a cracking-leaking-popping feeling. I remember dropping my water gun. Quickly, almost without thought, I took off my apron and walked out of the plant and drove home. It was midmorning, I remember, and the house was empty. Down in my chest there was still that leaking sensation, something very warm and precious spilling out, and I was covered with blood and hog-stink, and for a long while I just concentrated on holding myself together.”

“Together we understood what terror was: you're not human anymore. You're a shadow. You slip out of your own skin, like molting, shedding your own history and your own future, leaving behind everything you ever were or wanted to believed in. You know you're about to die. And it's not a movie and you aren't a hero and all you can do is whimper and wait. ”