I thought: this is how life is, ridiculous beyond comprehension.

Does a man become a revolutionary out of the belief he's entitled to joy rather than submission?

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

I live in southern Appalachia, so I'm surrounded by people who work very hard for barely a living wage. It's particularly painful that people are working the farms their parents and grandparents worked but aren't living nearly as well.

Time cures you first, and then it kills you.

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.

What keeps you going isn't some fine destination but just the road you're on, and the fact that you know how to drive. You keep your eyes open, you see this damned-to-hell world you got born into, and you ask yourself, 'What life can I live that will let me breathe in & out and love somebody or something and not run off screaming into the woods?