“I blinked deliberately, expecting my eyelids to act like lumberjacks. But the trees would not fall.”

“Sometimes I write about the forest, sometimes I write about the trees, and occasionally I’ll write about the lumberjack. Actually, the lumberjack is more the editing part, figuring what needs to be cut.”

“I want to crush my cigarette on his eyelid. I would rather he keep fucking me for the rest of the night than lie here staring at me tracing my ribs with his fingertips, acting like what happened meant something.”

“If Stalin or Hitler arrested me and tossed me into one of those camps, I would carve words with my fingernails. If they cut off my fingers, I would write with my teeth. If they pulled out my teeth, I would blink my words to any listening bird. If they cut off my eyelids, I would fart code into the troposphere. You'd have to kill me to stop me from writing. It's how I breathe.”

“...the meaning of my thoughts started to float away from me, like leaves that fall from a tree into a river, I was the tree, the world was the river.”

“I'm trying to keep"― he huffed, shifting his weight as the treetop bounced him―"my promise!"I blinked my wet blurry eyes, suddenly sure that I was dreaming."When did you ever promise to kill yourself falling out of Charlie's tree?”