When you already believe something, how can you suddenly stop? When you are a loyal friend, how can you no longer be one?

I discovered that maybe it was fate all along, that faith was just an illusion that somehow you're in control.

He asked if he could recite a poem he had written that morning: 'You speak,' he said, 'the language of shooting stars, more surprising than sunrise, more brilliant than the sun, as brief as sunset. I want to follow its trail to eternity.

We are lost, she and I, unseen and not seeing, unheard and not hearing, unknown by others.

I did not lose myself all at once. I rubbed out my face over the years washing away my pain, the same way carvings on stone are worn down by water.

Yesterday my daughter said to me, 'My marriage is falling apart.' And now all she can do is watch it falling.

Language is the tool of my trade -and I use them all - all the Englishes I grew up with