“When we came to America, though, we didn't know what the right thing was. Here we lived with no map. We became invisible, the people who swam in between other people's lives, bussing dishes, delive...”

“Maybe that's what living in America does to you: it spreads you into far distances until you're just little bits rolling apart.”

“Do not allow yourself to be blinded by fear and anger. Everything is only as it is.”

“Never get angry. If you have to get angry, get angry at yourself and not at others.”

“And a beautiful world we live in, when it is possible, and when many other such things are possible, and not only possible, but done-- done, see you!-- under that sky there, every day.”

“All words are pegs to hang ideas on.”

“A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.”

“No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake....”