My father wears his faith like the bronze breastplate of God's footsoldiers while our mother's is more like a good cloth coat with a secondhand fit.

No other continent has endured such an unspeakably bizarre combination of foreign thievery and foreign goodwill.

It's terrible to lose somebody, but it's also true that some people never have anybody to lose, and I think that's got to be so much worse.

The gods you do not pay are the ones that can curse you best.

organization is the religion of the single parent.

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.

(on asparagus) Europeans of the Renaissance swore by it as an aphrodisiac, and the church banned it from nunneries.