What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.

Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.

Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.

The body of literature, with its limits and edges, exists outside some people and inside others. Only after the writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature.

What is a house but a bigger skin, and a neighborhood map but the world's skin ever expanding?

A shepherd on a hilltop who looks at a mess of stars and thinks, ‘There’s a hunter, a plow, a fish,’ is making mental connections that have as much real force in the universe as the very fires in those stars themselves.

What do I make of all this texture? What does it mean about the kind of world in which I have been set down? The texture of the world, its filigree and scrollwork, means that there is the possibility for beauty here, a beauty inexhaustible in its complexity, which opens to my knock, which answers in me a call I do not remember calling, and which trains me to the wild and extravagant nature of the spirit I seek.