Status Updates From Presidio

"Just because a story isn't real doesn't mean it isn't true."

"Harlan's life from that time forward was grounded in guilt he felt for a sin he couldn't remember, a sin of neither omission nor commission.…he grew up a boy whose earliest memory was that he had killed his mother. He couldn't mourn her because he barely remembered her. He didn't remember her because he had killed her. And so on and so on, down to the bottom of his soul."

"I loved the democratic quiet of libraries—the sound absorbed by all the paper and buckram and dust—but I eventually had to give them up because librarians began to spook me with their quiet attentiveness; they're as bored as bartenders and they remember faces just as well."

"All he had ever felt in a cemetery was a sense of looking for something in the wrong place, worsened by the simple awkwardness of walking upright through fields of the permanently supine."

"The town wasn't old enough yet for the dead to outnumber the living."