There's nothing more embarrassing than to have earned the disfavor of a perceptive animal.

The whole house seemed to exhale a melancholy breath of emptiness

Do you think they were ever happy?""Definitely," I said."Definitely?""For sure.""She went crazy. His business failed. They couldn't have children of their own. He went to prison. HRT gave her cancer. I shot his brother in the eye and then married a man who cost him his business. When were they happy?""In the cracks?" I said."In the cracks.""Yeah.

It is always so simple, and so complicating, to accept an apology.

Finally I reached into my pocket and flipped a quarter. Heads was Phlox, tails was Arthur. It came up heads. I called Arthur.

Instead he had become immured, by fear and its majordomo, habit...

This is our life happening... and it’s happening right now.

That's why baseball is more like life than other games. Sometimes I feel like that's all I do in life, keep track of my errors.

The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place.