“How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are dee...”

“What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.”

“It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when...”

“Too young for Korea, too old for Vietnam.”

“Time and death: It's the ultimate vision of an artist at the end of everything. It's just what's there. It was not something I planned to do.”

“How language is webbed in the senses. Out of sand-blazed brilliance into quirky minds such as his, into touch, taste and fragrance. He thought he'd linger just a bit longer, let the bath take total...”

“The smell of home was indistinguishable from the smell of leaving home: each inhalation a mix of familiarity and fear.”

“When you have been with your partner for so many years, they become the glove compartment map that you've worn dog-eared and white-creased, the trail you recogonize so well you could draw it by hea...”

“I never wanted to live in that place again, but if for some reason I was forced to live there again, I would never accept the harsh judgments made against me by people whose only power to do so was...”

“There is no such thing as objectivity. We are all just interpreting signals from the universe and trying to make sense of them. Dim, shaky, weak, static-y little signals that only hint at the compl...”

“The word of God came down to man as rain to soil, and the result was mud, not clear water. (Bistami) Pg. 128”

“In Western culture, virtually everything is understood through the process of storytelling, often to the detriment of reality. When we recount history, we tend to use the life experience of one per...”

“Sometimes two people have to fall apart, to realize how much they need to fall back together.”

“Good literature is one key to peace. When we stop reading each other, when we stop paying attention to each other's words and stories, we too easily oppose one another.”

“There is only one motive for writing a novel: to be published and read. To me there is no distinction between the mystery novel and the novel, only between good books and bad books. A good book tak...”