I’m just not sure anyone can describe what God is so easily. If I had my way, I’d take a bit of every religion and science and philosophy, because then maybe the picture of God would be more complete, like a mosaic. I think mostly people pick just one idea of God, but when they do that they end up looking at this one little speck of something that’s really big and amazing. They look at that one speck in the mosaic and say, “That’s God,” and don’t see the rest of the picture around it. But.

Here’s the thing: we’re all as thin as paper. Like those paper people you used to find in old children’s magazines, inhabiting a two-page spread with other paper people, all of them hanging out somewhere together-at the park, at church, at school, at the mall, on the family room-until some kid took a pair of scissors to the dotted lines surrounding them and cut them out of their paper world. That’s us, that’s anyone. That was me. A cut-out paper person removed from the world I once belonged to.

Leaves fell around me, red and gold stars falling through the mist.

I didn’t need to be liked or accepted. I needed to know and to accept myself.

Here they were, the people we were becoming, about to knock on our front door, hoping they could undo the mistakes we were making at that very moment.

You’re both treated fairly,” she said, “but sometimes people require different things for true fairness.

Small towns in remote corners of the world are really quaint, unless you don’t fit into them. Then they’re just small.

In Japan, people have something called their charm point. A coy smile, a twinkle in the eye, a faultless sense of humour, or a laugh no one has heard in the history of laughs before. The thing that makes others love you.

I tried. I tried to burn that memory of my regret. But I wasn’t dead yet, I was just on my way to dying, and it’s harder to burn memories when you’ve still got life left. When you’re alive you have to learn how to live with things like regret.

The terrible thing about love is that it takes away your safety net, your balancing pole. Even the tightrope you walk upon will disappear beneath you, yet love expects you to keep walking anyway, arms outstretched, one foot after the other, on nothing more than air.