You have to understand, it’s how we are here. It’s like we’re all asleep. We grow up, we fall asleep, and then the horrors that scared us before – we’re doing them. We’re the monsters in the nightmare.

There were others like her. Of course there were. How had she ever thought there would not be?

Yo, I feel this been the truth of all our time together. We always been a grief that huddle close against a vicious light.

That sense of the world being the lack of something dogged him for years, and when it stopped dogging him, he felt unmoored.

When I been small, once Driver told me cricket singing was the voice of stars.

Is only skew insanities, how God survive when we all kilt. How any person worship gods, when gods ain’t even brave to die.

Then we all sat around, we were supposed to be awed. I was brattishly unawed.

I know, ain’t evils in no life nor cruelties in no red hell can change the vally heart of Ice Cream Star.

Every pain be gold.

She couldn’t know anyone, but someone still needed her. She couldn’t be anyone, but she could still love.