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All afternoon, I bathe in the waters of those leaves.
we have to find a way to discipline our hearts so that their cruelty doesn’t turn us into hurt animals.
The thing about tears is that they can be as quiet as a cloud floating across a desert sky.
Words exist only in theory. And then one ordinary day you run into a word that only exists in theory and meet it face to face. And then that word becomes someone you know.
“You’re starting to talk like the last book you read.”
When is the right time for anything? Who knows? Living is an art, not a science.
“Every generation thinks they’re the coolest canoe that’s ever come down the river.”
What if hummingbirds lost their wings? We had twenty-four hours to come back with an answer, and it took her precisely ten hours and seven minutes to text me back: Then it would rain for days and the world would know the rage of the grieving sky.
just because she doesn’t love Sam the way you or I would like her to doesn’t mean she doesn’t love her daughter.
I looked out at the autumn fields. If it weren’t for the river, the whole area would have been nothing but desert. But the river brought water to the fields and turned the landscape into a fertile valley. And I thought, My dad, he is like the river. He brought water to a lot of people—mostly to me, but also to Sam.
My theory was that he kept up with the sports world in order to be able to have a decent conversation with his brothers—that was the way he loved them.
“I told you that there were only two things you needed to learn in life. You needed to learn how to forgive. And you needed to learn how to be happy.”
Why does it hurt when you love someone? What is it with the human heart?
When I was a kid, he used to pick me up, and I thought I could see the whole world as I sat on his shoulders. And he was always sneaking bills into my hand—ones, fives, tens, twenties—his way of loving me.
“I’m proud of you,” he said. “You’re a good kid. You’re gonna be somebody.” We’re all somebody. That’s what I thought.
it’s not other people who make you feel like you’re alone. You do it to yourself.”
“Don’t ever underestimate the people who love you.”
“I know you sometimes think that people are like books. But our lives don’t have neat logical plots, and we don’t always say beautiful, intelligent things like the characters in a novel. That’s not the way life is. And we’re not like letters—”
He started laughing. And then I started laughing. Whistling in the dark.
It was as if all the scenes of my life were running through my brain like a pack of dogs running through the streets, dogs running and running, unable to stop even though they were tired.
I guess there were people walking around in the world who understood how to comfort people. Comfort, that was the word for the day. I liked that word better than death.
on that day she was wearing dignity. So much more beautiful than pearls.
whatever was scratching would just scratch and scratch until you opened the door. I sat back down at the kitchen table. What was it about kitchen tables?
“Your father knows how to give. But sometimes he needs someone to give him something too.”
SAM AND I ran through the streets of Sunset Heights. Yeah, we were zigzagging through our neighborhood. Maybe that’s what life was. You zigged and you zagged, and then you got up every morning and zigged and zagged some more.
Her laugh was as fragile as the leaves she had raked when I was five.
I was trying to focus, but my mind was wandering. I felt like a piece of paper in the wind being blown this way and that way and wanting only to land on the ground, but the wind had other ideas.
I wondered if that’s what death sounded like. Like a snowflake falling on the ground.
