Hope is a horrible thing, you know. I don't know who decided to package hope as a virtue because it's not. It's a plague. Hope is like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and somebody just keeps pulling it and pulling it.

Carmen prayed hard. She prayed while standing near the priest in hopes it would give her request extra credibility. What she prayed for was nothing. She prayed that God would look on them and see the beauty of their existence and leave them alone.

The kind of love that offers its life so easily, so stupidly, is always the love that is not returned.

It's always better to have too much to read than not enough.

Anytime you write about priests or cops, they're hot-button professions.

You can’t control what other people think about your art. Think about the part of yourself that you can control, which is your ability to be kind and loving and creative.

In this life we love who we love. There were some stories in which facts were very nearly irrelevant.