“Nobody's happy. What's happy? Happiness is over when the lights come on”

“How could I possibly NOT be disappointed by what I would find? Nothing had ever met my expectation, since nothing could compete with my doctoring imagination, my pathetic compulsion to make the wor...”

“It took so long to find you...and now I don't want it to change. I want it all set in amber. I want us and nobody else in the most selfish way you can imagine. I can't help it--I'm old-fashioned. I...”

“I know I can't tell you what it's like to be gay. But I can tell you what it's not. It's not hiding behind words, Mama. Like family and decency and Christianity.”

“I couldn't writeor wouldn't write, at any rateunable to face the grueling self-scrutiny that fiction demands”

“Pete thinks we all have a blacking factory: some awful moment, early on, when we surrender our childish hearts as surely as we lose our baby teeth.”

“What worked yesterday doesn't always work today.”

“The vision of your tomorrow that you have today strengthens you for the morrow”

“Let us not be deceived we are today in the midst of a cold war.”

“We must seize every opportunity we can to speak the truth and proclaim peace. Especially now. There's so little time for many.”

“I would rather be an opportunist and float than go to the bottom with my principles around my neck.”

“Engage people with what they expect; it is what they are able to discern and confirms their projections. It settles them into predictable patterns of response, occupying their minds while you wait ...”

“They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked high...”

“The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.”

“If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and...”