What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.

Americans who read and think are patriots of the first order. The kind who know enough to roll their eyes whenever anyone tries to claim sole custody of the flag and weild it as a blunt instrument. There are as many ways to love America as there are Americans, and our country needs us all.

Tomorrow these villagers would carry their secret icons into the church without any priest and light the candles themselves, moving together in single-minded grace. Like the school of the fish, so driven to righteousness they could flout the law, declare the safety of their souls, then go home and destroy the evidence.

It feels strange to me to be living in a box, hiding from the steadying influence of the moon; wearing the hide of a cow, which is supposed to be dyed to match God-knows-what, on my feet; making promises over the telephone about things I will do at a precise hour next year.

When moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that's awfully hard not to poke.

You see mother, you had no life of your own. They have no idea. One has only a life of one's own.

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.