People will say to you, "Oh, you are fearless." That is so not true. We should stop saying that about people. It's a slander, really.

I started out as a poet. I've always been a poet since I was 7 or 8. And so I feel myself to be fundamentally a poet who got into writing novels.

Well, sometime Mr —— git on me pretty hard. I have to talk to Old Maker. But he my husband. I shrug my shoulders. This life soon be over, I say. Heaven last all ways. You ought to bash Mr —— head open, she say. Think bout heaven later.

I don't know nothing, I think. And glad of it.

You can just keep going and going and going, and you never get to the end of it because there is no end. The ending is a beginning. If you feel like that, then you accept that wherever you have to stop on this journey, you continue in some other form somewhere else.

Storytelling, you know, has a real function. The process of the storytelling is itself a healing process, partly because you have someone there who is taking the time to tell you a story that has great meaning to them. They're taking the time to do this because your life could use some help, but they don't want to come over and just give advice. They want to give it to you in a form that becomes inseparable from your whole self. That's what stories do. Stories differ from advice in that, once you get them, they become a fabric of your whole soul. That is why they heal you.

I love us so incredibly, insanely deeply; it's almost unbearable to see what we do to ourselves.