A breeze shook rain out of new leaves onto their hair, but in their pursuit of eternity they never noticed the chill.

I've about decided that's the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you're a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench.

For time and eternity there have been fathers like Nathan who simply can see no way to have a daughter but to own her like a plot of land. To work her, plow her under, rain down a dreadful poison upon her. Miraculously, it causes these girls to grow. They elongate on the pale slender stalks of their longing, like sunflowers with heavy heads. You can shield them with your body and soul, trying to absorb that awful rain, but they'll still move toward him. Without cease they'll bend to his light.

I know I'm a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science.

There must be limits, somewhere, to the human footprint on this earth. When the whole of the world is reduced to nothing but human product, we will have lost the map that can show us how we got here, and can offer our spirits an answer when we ask why. Surely we are capable of declaring sacred some quarters that we dare not enter or possess.

The most assiduous task of parenting is to divine the difference between boundaries and bondage.

Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.