What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.
Storm in a shot glass type of thing. And Angus was the opposite. A whole ocean, dark and chill.
Four demons spawned by four different starving hearts.
The women that loomed large in my life were all getting small.
That’s high school for you, a bevy of people unfit for adult life encounters in any form.
The hopeless wishes that won’t quit stalking you: some perfect words you think you could say to somebody to make them see you, and love you, and stay. Or could say to your mirror, same reason.
People want somebody to kick around, I get that. But why is it us? Why couldn’t it be, I don’t know, a Dakota or something? Why not Florida?
But Coach and I were twelve-step brothers, there’s a code. I’d showed up.
Here, all we can ever be is everything we’ve been.
Good people don’t give up on the ones they love.
A dead parent is a tricky kind of ghost. If you can make it into more like a doll, putting it in the real house and clothes and such that they had, it helps you to picture them as a person instead of just a person-shaped hole in the air.
It hit me pretty hard, how there’s no kind of sad in this world that will stop it turning. People will keep on wanting what they want, and you’re on your own.
People buying apples and green beans usually have some degree of joy in their hearts.
For the kids who wake up hungry in those dark places every day, who’ve lost their families to poverty and pain pills, whose caseworkers keep losing their files, who feel invisible, or wish they were: this book is for you.
Damn April to hell, I could be done with that one. November also. Birthdays, Christmas, dogwoods and redbuds, even football season. Live long enough, and all the things you ever loved can turn around to scorch you blind. the wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.
Mom had promised to stay clean as long as I was a good enough son to make it worth her while.
Likewise the Charles Dickens one, seriously old guy, dead and a foreigner, but Christ Jesus did he get the picture on kids and orphans getting screwed over and nobody giving a rat’s ass. You’d think he was from around here.
People find more ways to shut up their monsters than a Bible has verses.
I wanted to go home. Which was nowhere, but it’s a feeling you keep having, even after that’s no place anymore.
The eye sees what it cares enough to see.
There’s this thing that happens, let’s say at school where a bunch of guys are in the bathroom, at the urinal, laughing about some dork that made an anus of himself in gym. You’re all basically nice guys, right? You know right from wrong, and would not in a million years be brutal to the poor guy’s face. And then it happens: the dork was in the shitter. He comes out of the stall with this look. He heard everything. And you realize you’re not really that nice of a guy.