“I lock all my scaredness down in my stomach until the fear hardens into something I hardly notice. I myself harden into a person that I hardly notice.”

“A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.”

“I liked to call myself a poet and had affected a habit of reading classical texts (in translation, of course I was a lazy student). I would ride the Greyhound for thirty-six hours down from the Mi...”

“I loved the idea that looking at a painting or listening to a concerto could make you somehow "transcend" the day-in, day-out bullshit that grinds you down: how in one instant of pure attention you...”

“That bar also delineated the realm of sweat and hourly wage, the working world that college was educating me to leave. Rewards in that realm were few. No one congratulated you for clocking out. You...”

“Just being out of the house with Daddy like this at Fisher's lights me up enough for somebody to read by me.”

“here she is, all mine, trying her best to give me all she can. How could I ever hurt her? But I didnt understand then. That I could hurt somebody so badly she would never recover. That a person can...”

“Any happiness, no matter how brief, seemed better than the long, simmering torture of waking up day after day, knowing I could never have him.”

“Everyone always wants to know how you can tell when it's true love, and the answer is this: when the pain doesn't fade and the scars don't heal, and it's too damned late.”

“Thats when I first learned that it wasnt enough to just do your job, you had to have an interest in it, even a passion for it.”

“Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”

“Being by his faith replaced afresh in paradise and created anew, he (the believer)does not need works for his justification, but that he may not be idle, but that he may exercise his own body and p...”