Blessed be they whose lives do not taste of evilbut if some god shakes your houseruin arrivesruin does not leaveit comes tolling over the generationsit comes rolling the black night salt up from the ocean floorand all your thrashed coasts groan

You used to say. "Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness." Madness doubled is marriage I added when the caustic was cool, not intending to produce a golden rule.

Homer must have felt this pressure to come up with an epic poem that would sound totally new to an audience that had loved his previous best-seller.

You can get used to eating breakfast with a man in a fedora. You can get used to anything, my mother was in the habit of saying.

Comfortable means gradually more and more flattened down, more and more blunt - less and less sharp and biting into you.

A refugee population is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen.

You remember too much," my mother said to me recently. "Why hold onto all that?" And I said, "where can I put it down?