The bad thing about small-town life is that everybody knows your business...I suppose that is my central obsession. What we owe to society, what we owe to ourselves.

Stop a minute, right where you are. Relax your shoulders, shake your head and spine like a dog shaking off cold water. Tell that imperious voice in your head to be still.

I'm never going to tell the reader what to believe; I'm going to examine these characters that believe different ways, and examine their motives.

You know what the issue is? Do you want to know? It's what these guys have decided to call America. They have the audacity to say, 'There, you sons of bitches, don't lay a finger on it. That is a finished product.'" "But any country is still in the making. Always. That's just history, people have to see that.

At some point in my life I'd honestly hoped love would rescue me from the cold, drafty castle I lived in. But at another point, much earlier I think, I'd quietly begun to hope for nothing at all in the way of love, so as not to be disappointed. It works. It gets to be a habit.

Every one of us is called upon, perhaps many times, to start a new life. A frightening diagnosis, a marriage, a move, loss of a job...And onward full-tilt we go, pitched and wrecked and absurdly resolute, driven in spite of everything to make good on a new shore. To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another--that is surely the basic instinct...Crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is.

You never knew which split second might be the zigzag bolt dividing all that went before from the everything that comes next.