Their silence comfortable. Something unfolding. But what? Not love, which wrenched and wounded. Not love, which came only once.

It is my feeling that a story is not finished until it is read, and that the reader finishes it through his or her life experience, prejudices, worldview and thoughts.

Everybody that went away suffered a broken heart. "I'm coming back some day," they all wrote. But never did. The old life was too small to fit anymore.

Walking on the land or digging in the fine soil I am intensely aware that time quivers slightly, changes occurring in imperceptible and minute ways, accumulating so subtly that they seem not to exist. Yet the tiny shifts in everything--cell replication, the rain of dust motes, lengthening hair, wind-pushed rocks--press inexorably on and on.

If you get the landscape right, the characters will step out of it, and they'll be in the right place.

If life was an arc of light that began in darkness, ended in darkness, the first part of his life had happened in ordinary glare. Here it was as though he had found a polarized lens that deepened and intensified all seen through it.

A spinning coin, still balanced on its rim, may fall in either direction.