The sacrifice is usually chained to the rock. She does not usually dance out to meet her monster. - Alexander Chee

I sang it as a gift to the audience, to the composer, to me. I sang it as a taunt to the Fates, too. I was weary of my fears as well as my desires, and so I sang it in simple defiance of all of it, even defying myself.

The freedom to imagine that as yet unimaginable work in front of others, moving them to still more action you can't imagine, that is the point of writing, to me. You may think it is humility to imagine your work doesn't matter. It isn't. Much the way you don't know what a writer will go on to write, you don't know what a reader, having read you, will do.

The enormity of what had happened was not yet clear, but I decided if the world was going to end that day, I was going to need coffee to face it.