“I am not a smart man, particularly, but one day, at long last, I stumbled from the dark woods of my own, and my family's, and my country's past, holding in my hands these truths: that love grows fr...”

“I needed her to stop. Needed not to hear the pain in her voice--to see the way she was twisting the pocketbook strap. If she kept talking, she might break down and tell me everything.”

“A woman who surrenders her freedom need not surrender her dignity.”

“Is that what love is all about? Needing them to come back to you when they're away? To come home and keep you safe?”

“Look, don't just stare at the pages," I used to tell my students. "Become the characters. Live inside the book.”

“I started writing because of a terrible feeling of powerlessness," the novelist Anita Brookner has said. The National Book Award winner Alice McDermott noted that the most difficult thing about bec...”

“[All the ancient wisdom] tells us that work is necessary to us, as much a part of our condition as mortality; that good work is our salvation and our joy; that shoddy or dishonest or self-serving w...”

“We have made it our overriding ambition to escape work, and as a consequence have debased work until it is only fit to escape from. We have debased the products of work and have been, in turn, deba...”

“We left behind the other kids; their path-working, drinking, and being grown up- and rejected all that made them grumpy, uncreative and lifeless. We dumpstered, squatted, and shoplifted our lives b...”

“The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't li...”

“I wonder if fears ever really go away, or if they just lose their power over us.”

“Fear is all in the mind”

“I have a deep and profound mistrust of all politicians.”

“Think and keep quiet among those you don't trust.”

“I have long seen my spirituality as personal, to the degree that I harbor a slight mistrust for anyone who practices similarly. It is as though they are admitting to have on the same cut and color ...”