I’ve never understood how so many barely literate people read the Bible so much. It’s hard.

Whenever Ter read a book, rarely – he would rip each page off and throw it away. I would come home, to where the windows were always open or broken and the whole room would be swirling with pages, like Safeway lot pigeons.

Some lady at a bridge party somewhere started the rumor that to test the honesty of a cleaning woman you leave little rosebud ashtrays around with loose change in them, here and there. My solution to this is to always add a few pennies, even a dime.

I like my job in emergency. Blood, bones, tendons seem like affirmations to me. I am awed by the human body, by its endurance. Thank God – because it’ll be hours before X-Ray or Demerol. Maybe I’m morbid. I am fascinated by two fingers in a baggie, a glittering switchblade all the way out of a lean pimp’s back. I like the fact, in Emergency, everything is reparable, or not.

The day my father killed off my mother was the day he stopped knowing me.

The only reason I have lived so long is that I let go of my past. Shut the door on grief on regret on remorse.

The moon. There’s no other moon like one on a clear New Mexico night. It rises over the Sandias and soothes the miles and miles of barren desert with all the quiet whiteness of a first snow.

God sends drunks blackouts because if they knew what they had done they would surely die of shame.

She wiped the mirror so she could look at herself. Mediocre and grim, she thought. Not mediocre, her face, with wide gray eyes, fine nose and smile, but it was grim. A good body, but so long disregarded it seemed grim too.

I’ve never understood how so many barely literate people read the Bible so much. It’s hard. In the same way it surprises me that uneducated seamstresses all over the world can figure out how to put in sleeves and zippers.