I look at my four boys, who are the colors of silt, loam, dust, and clay, an infinite palette for children of their own, and I understand that time erases whiteness altogether.

Fiction is a sort of inter-human magic, allowing you to travel into a scene and feel it tingle on your skin.

Friends, there is nothing like your own family to make you appreciate strangers!

We agreed with him in principal - we were little scientists, born and bred. But children robbed of love will dwell on magic.

I rarely think of poetry as something I make happen; it is more accurate to say that it happens to me. Like a summer storm, a house afire, or the coincidence of both on the same day.

A person could spend most of a lifetime in retrospective terror, thinking of all the things one nearly didn't do.

It's the one thing we never quite get over: that we contain our own future.