I decided to walk, and while I did I imagined rooms all over the city that housed archives no one has ever heard of, like last words, white lies, and false descendants of Catherine the Great.

And so she always returns, no matter how often she leaves or how far she goes, appearing soundlessly behind him and covering his eyes with her hands, spoiling for him anyone whos could ever come after her.

It was years before I'd spent all the joy and pain born in me in that less than half a minute.

Down that drain had gone all the clipped nails, hairs, and grains of dirt washed from the dead. The faucet had a leak, and with every drip, I felt my life ebbing away.

"It's one of those unforgettable moments that happen as a child, when you discover that all along the world has been betraying you."

 "I tried to make sense of things. Now that I think about it, I have always tried. It could be my epitaph. LEO GURSKY: HE TRIED TO MAKE SENSE."

"To prove that I was off my rocker, I gave him the Queen's wave."

 "...he knew that to remove her name would be like erasing all the punctuation, and the vowels, and every adjective and noun. Because without Alma, there would have been no book."

"He learned to live with the truth. Not to accept it, but to live with it. It was like living with an elephant. His room was tiny, and every morning he had to squeeze around the truth just to get to the bathroom. To reach the armoire to get a pair of underpants he had to crawl under the truth, praying it wouldn't choose that moment to sit on his face. At night, when he closed his eyes, he felt it looming above him."