Allen & Unwin

They stayed, many of them, because staying was easier and less scary than leaving, and because for a while at least they’d be able to draw unemploy

They stayed, many of them, because staying was easier and less scary than leaving, and because for a while at least they’d be able to draw unemploy

Being mayor of Empire Falls was a full-time job with a part-time salary,

If chickens had any idea what was in store for them, they’d stay where they were in their eggs.

Good fences make good neighbors.

The terrible truth was that such slender gestures seemed even to Miles, at sixteen, both too much and too little, more than just about everyone else was willing to do but far less than conscience dictated.

it was a lot easier to forget a thousand things you wanted to remember than the one thing you wanted to lose sight of.

Just because things happen slow doesn’t mean you’ll be ready for them.

“Slow” works on an altogether different principle, on the deceptive impression that there’s plenty of time to prepare, which conceals the central fact, that no matter how slow things go, you’ll always be slower.

When I was five years old, I was taking my electronic toys apart to see how they worked. (I also attempted to put them back together, with mixed results.) I have always been a voracious reader. I was reading college-level physics books bought at garage sales in the second grade. I used to annoy my father to no end wanting to build scale models of nuclear reactors, submarines, trains, anything you could think of. I have only had very small groups of close friends. I always considered that odd but never knew how to go about correcting it. Quite frankly, I find most people quite annoying and illogical—probably another common Asperger trait. :)