These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections-sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent-that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.

I went to church irregularly and was mostly reading comics in the pew.

I wanted to be the moron of the family, because morons seemed to have more fun, more freedom and more personality.

I find talking about my work harder than it might be if honesty wasn't my calling card.

I was like I was in science class: I was curious.