At first blush, it may seem odd that the world’s most popular football song comes from musical theater. But football is theater, and fans make it musical theater.

I never excelled academically, and took some pride in “not fulfilling my potential,” in part because I was terrified that if I tried my hardest, the world would learn I didn’t actually have that much potential.

A book must start somewhere. One brave letter must volunteer to go first, laying itself on the line in an act of faith, from which a word takes heart and follows, drawing a sentence into its wake. From there, a paragraph amasses, and soon a page, and the book is on its way, finding a voice, calling itself into being. A book must start somewhere, and this one starts here.

she was burned until she became ashes and then he gave the ashes to the wind. In this way, she traveled across great distances, plural and multiplied, seeing everything simultaneously, all places and all times.

illustration should be the instrument that invites the reader to digest—a break in the forward propulsion of time, the same way silence punctuates music. That is why they call silence a rest.

When we were young, she tells him, I thought my world revolved around you. And here, I learn it still does.

What she was suggesting was absurd, but she liked the way it sounded. She liked the way it made the strange familiar and the wrong somehow true.

Learn and Love and Lose, the three great obligations.

Because she knows within her there lingers something unfamiliar and perverse, something at the limits of dread, Edmond Halley’s niece fears for her future. [...] It must be in her flesh, the costume that covers her frame. It must be in the way the skin wraps itself around its bone scaffolding.

In the sky, realms disband. In the woods, two men kiss. Read more closely: there are breadcrumbs everywhere.

come to realize just how much the human body isn’t made to see. For example, the whole night or our own faces. It must be some trick to make sure we can’t bear witness to too much.

She will not know much about being an adult and even less about being a parent, but she’ll know a great deal about being someone’s child.

He will smile at the ground, recalling that night. He will smile at the ground and think about the pleasure of the woods.

In his autobiography, Jacob will write: “The imagination knows how to decorate and enliven bare and empty places.” In his autobiography, Jacob will write: “All this never hurt me.”

She will listen and remember what it meant to be a child, when all stories were shared events. Now reading is a solitary venture.

Jacob will think: What is at stake in sharing this story? And Wilhelm will think: What is at stake in leaving this story untold?