By now, the camouflage had become my skin. My friends wouldn't want to know. Who would want to know? I certainly didn't want to know. All I wanted was to hold my assumptions to the light, and to watch them sparkle in their facets, as all sham gemstones do.

Everybody wants life to speak to them with special kindness. Every personal story begs to be steered toward reverie, toward some relief from unpleasant truths: That you are a self, that beyond anything else you want the best for that self. That, if it is to be you or someone else, you need it to be you, no matter what.

The cracks in old friendships are measured in awkward pauses.

When you know you are dying, self-deceptions fly from your bedside like embers off a bonfire.

Love wasn't a thing you fell in, but rose to. It was what stopped you from falling.

I think each family has a funhouse logic all its own, and in that distortion,in that delusion, all behavior can seem both perfectly normal and crazy.

I've come to see our central nervous system as a kind of vintage switchboard, all thick foam wires and old-fashioned plugs. The circuitry isn't properly equipped after a surplus of emotional information the system overloads, the circuit breaks, the board runs dark. That's what shock is.

Sometimes one learns too early, as I did, what the world is capable of.

Things don't go away. They become you.

I'd violated the primary rule of junior and senior high-- don't get people talking about you too much. This was wearing the brightest shirt on the playground. This was Mom giving you a kiss in the lobby.