“When friends come over, I tell them the house shakes because it’s on a fault line. I don’t tell them the house is upset. I don’t tell them the trees tap the windows at night and the wind only blows at dinner time and the floor tilts upstairs, so Sis and I have to lean against the wall to get to our rooms. I don’t tell them Mom and Dad walk with their hands out like acrobats to get to their room.”

“‘Well, if you want someone to run in the primary, I’m your man!’ he exclaimed. ‘A man with no proper sense of himself—a man with nothing inside, who could therefore be all things to all people. Ahahahaha.’ He was moved to laughter by his own eloquence, by what he felt to be the truth and the transformative power of what he was saying, to the one person who could get it.”

"I changed the channels. The news was on over and over. They were talking about that goddamned arsonist again. Someone had been setting crack houses on fire over in the black part of town. They had set another one just now. This made eight."

“This isn’t some soft, sad Subway sandwich. The bread has integrity and the filling is the consistency of the most robust tuna salad Susie has ever seen, rich from the ratio of mayo but counterbalanced by the crunch of blitzed banana peppers. It tastes like a late night snack and lazy lunch all wrapped into one.”

“With O.J. there was an abyss of recklessness I was willing to dive into, a waxing appetite for danger I was unsure I could swallow.”

“She is either the trickster god of the desert or a divine messenger. Neither option is welcome, especially now.”

“In the spring of 2020, when the lockdown began, Liz still owned the ax that broke down her childhood front door…”

“Even if it’s just a small piece of me, it’s good practice for the trillions of years yet to pass in which I will not exist.”

“The balloon continued to expand until it was big enough for me to crawl inside and curl up like an embryo in a green rubber womb.”