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

Nonfiction is easy and fiction is hard.

For the most part wisdom comes in chips rather than blocks. You have to be willing to gather them constantly, and from sources you never imagined to be probable. No one chip gives you the answer for everything. No one chip stays in the same place throughout your entire life. The secret is to keep adding voices, adding ideas, and moving things around as you put together your life. If you’re lucky, putting together your life is a process that will last through every single day you’re alive.

Because of her singing they all went away feeling moved, feeling comforted, feeling, perhaps, the slightest tremors of faith.

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

It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.

If someone loves you for what you can do then it's flattering, but why do you love them? If someone loves you for who you are then they have to know you, which means you have to know them.