The unsaid thing about funerals is that directly after the communal mourning for someone you love, after everyone is gone and the connected grief dispersed, comes a solitude beyond imagining. A great, gaping nothing where a whole person and life and future used to be. The other side of a funeral is abyss.

Because broken hearts strip vocabularies down to their raw bones…

When Kyra makes all the males disappear, she must choose her sister who hates her or the man who loves her.

No one keeps every book they read, which means the ones we do keep are important. A person’s library is like a fingerprint.

“Grief can change a person to the point where they become someone they don’t know, or even like very much. I don’t want that to happen to you.”

And that is why the world has Holy Grails - not because the world needs Holy Grails, but because the world needs heroes.

Who cared that life was lonely, that jobs were thankless drudgery, that the romance of the proud American state was myth, that the rules of life were laid carefully in neat books and laws written by stern Europeans who stalked the town and state like the grim reaper, with their righteous churches spouting that Jews murdered their precious Jesus Christ?

Perhaps that is what it is like being with other people. Perhaps even people you like and admire immensely can make you see the World in ways you would rather not.

I would never be adorable and bubbling over with praise for myself and others. Instead, I was still and cold, and I had to hope that was enough.

But what do you need dignity for, when the world is ending anyway?

“Nothing is impossible for those with the vision and will to bring it into being.”

I don’t think we know what we’re made of until the worst moment possible happens. Then we must decide who we truly are and what is most important to us. I think we’re often surprised by what we become.

Endings were often found in beginnings, and she began to type what she knew.

I did not know when humans pray for nature, they pray for something to control.

Creativity is only possible in an imperfect world. In a perfect, complete world it is not possible at all.

Bad things happen when white people discover the gifts of brown women.

I want to meet you in every place I ever loved. Listen to me. I am your echo. I would rather break the world than lose you.

A mind-bending novella about past, present, and future selves.

The plot hadn’t really got going yet - a lot of backstory - but something exciting was going to happen soon. It had to: the title promised it.

My father told me once it wasn’t true that people get more conservative over time; he said they just get tired and it’s easy when you’re tired to be agreeable.