One of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you can’t drag the reader through everything. Every human life is worth 20 memoirs.

Somewhere, sometime I'd stopped expecting my father to father.

my belief in the sacrament of the Eucharist is simple: without touch, God is a monologue, an idea, a philosophy; he must touch and be touched, the tongue on flesh, and that touch is the result of the monologues, the idea, the philosophies which led to faith; but in the instant of the touch there is no place for thinking, for talking; the silent touch affirms all that, and goes deeper: it affirms the mysteries of love and mortality.

Don't outline your stories. A lot of fiction workshops say you should. I say the opposite. I quote Grace Paley: "We write what we don't know we know."

For the twenty million Americans who are hungry tonight, for the homeless freezing tonight, literature is as useless as a knowledge of astronomy.

I wonder if politicians know less about the land, now that they campaign by air.

After the dead are buried, after the physical pain of grief has become a permanent wound in the soul, then comes the transcendent and common bond of human suffering, and with that comes forgiveness, and with forgiveness comes love.