Dara Horn

There's no such thing as a problem that's yours and not mine.

When he finally fell asleep, his dreams contained no stories at all, but only the hard stones of thoughts: the unimaginably unlikely coincidence of being alive at the same time as the love of your life, the frequency with which a person was expected to bear the body and the burden of someone else, the idiocy of thinking that kindness can protect the person who is kind, and worst of all, the bottomless pit of a truth that he had suddenly, sickeningly seen: that the world to come that his parents had always talked about was not an afterlife at all, but simply this world, to come--the future world, your own future, that you were creating for yourself with every choice you made in it.

Most of the other visitors were chained to their audio guides, looking only at what their little headsets told them was worth seeing.

Time itself is created through deeds of true kindness.

Before being born, his mother explained, babies go to school. Not a school like Boris__, but a different kind of school, where all the teachers are angels. The angels teach each baby the entire Torah, along with all of the secrets of the universe. Then, just before each baby is born, an angel puts its finger right below the baby__ nose__ere she paused to put her finger across his lips (could he see the blood under her skin, or did he only imagine it?)__nd whispers to the child: Shh__on__ tell. And then the baby forgets. __hy does he have to forget?_ Boris had asked, moving his lips beneath her finger. He didn__ want to know, not really. But his mother__ back had stiffened, and he could feel that she might get up at any moment, put out the light, walk away, disappear. She pulled her hand away from his face, resting it on her own stomach. __o that for the rest of his life,_ she said, __e will always have to pay attention to the world, and to everything that happens in it, to try to remember all the things he__ forgotten.

Another remarkable thing about the dead is that they are all ages, preserved at every age you ever knew them, and at no age at all.

School is a terrible place, I have decided. There is nothing good about it except for math class. Everything else is a total waste of time. As I mentioned before I have done a lot of reading about prisons, and I notice that they always describe them as painted in very dull colors, and my school is also painted in these kinds of colors, with greenish lockers and brownish walls and grayish floors. Actually they recently fixed up one wing of the school, and now that part of the school is just the opposite__ll the colors are really bright, with bright red and yellow lockers and blue doors and shiny white floors that are already all scuffed up. It's funny because I thought the other colors were terrible but these are much worse, because they make it seem like it's normal to be happy there when it isn't.