Cathy's Key

He was what she had always needed her father to be.

The whole point of love is that it happens now. Here. Between daybreak and nightfall.

My mom is a black-no-sugar woman, but I basically believe in turning my coffee into cheesecake.

My anger turned small and hid. It was like that kid feeling you get when you are sad or hurt or lonely and you scream or cry to your parents and they crush you with their grown up feelings. Rage as big as the sky. Loneliness like an ocean you could drown in. Huge grown up feelings that annihilate you where you stand.

The hands were beautiful, deft and wise: hands for steadying a bicycle, for pouring milk into a cereal bowl, hands for putting on Band-Aids and ruffling your hair.

Victor looked at me with troubled eyes. "Your life is a journey to a destination I can't even imagine. I can give you a lot of things, I can give you money and safety and all my heart... but maybe that isn't what you really need." He stirred, looking out into dusk. "Maybe company on the journey is the only thing that matters." The last thin edge of the sun slipped into the sea and darkness seeped into the valley. "I do know I will love you forever," Victor said. "And forever, for me, is a very long time.

He said that mixing an omelet was a lot like mixing paint: the eggs were my basic palette, and then I could build tastes out of whatever ingredients I had around.

Licking the powder off my fingertips I decided that bravery was overrated. Sometimes sugar is just as good.

Still life." What a lie. Life isn't still. Death is.

It was just past midnight and I was trudging through the St. Louis Greyhound station, a grim building obviously brought to you by the people who design high school bathrooms.

I thought about what an intensely human act it was to get a tattoo, taking an image or a slogan, some stray momentary emotion, and cutting it into your body so that it could never heal and never be erased.

We are all animals. We're born them and we break like them and that's the truth at the bottom of things. We think we're special because we have produced Rambrant and Pop-tarts and infomercials, but death is our real common heritage.

Time is long, death is patient, and the ghosts will always outlive the grieving.

Ah, Time. Nobody knows better than a portrait artist that time marks us, it nicks us up and leaves us looking used, like a well-traveled suitcase or a favourite book.

To most rich people, money is power." I opened the door and got out of the truck. "That's what's cool about Emma," Pete said. "She's totally into money, but she isn't like that at all. Money isn't power to her." "What is it?" He thought about it for a second, then grinned. "Lego," he said.