Love at first sight always sounded to me like somebody’s delusion. But I loved You before I saw your face. Love before sight—which sounds even crazier.

As if we are lucky to be alive at all in the world that they control. Ask any stone or flower if it feels grateful to be here. Your mother does not have much advice to pass on, but I can tell you when to be wary. You should be grateful is a sentence that the powerful wield like a cudgel.

It’s rarely the truth itself that people can’t accept. It’s how they feel about it.

Church ladies threw Bible verses at me with the same frenzy that they tossed lilies and clumps of sod at the open graves, eager to seal up a hole. I got the sense they would have loved to bury me, too. Tidier that way.

A thing doesn’t hurt you so much if you draw it close as it does when you keep pushing it away.

Kindness has its own electric current. I am almost never expecting it.

The past was not so sacrosanct, I discovered. You could simply make more up.

Why should money make evil comprehensible to anyone? But it does precisely this. Greed, violence, cruelty—money can explain them. Money can make the most heinous act seem like a sane one. A business decision, a necessary calculation. Evil’s genius is to costume itself as sense. The “reasonable choice.”

would like to learn a new use for my emptiness—my spaciousness. Look at the rosewood mandolin in the corner of this bedroom. People string catgut over a hole, and send music pouring into the atmosphere. Maybe I can restring myself, and learn how to make music from my hollow place.