Rain is used as white noise when God is disgusted by too much prayer, when the sky is stuffed to bursting with the noise of what people need.

It's lonely to listen to the pleasure of others, not that I've made a habit of that kind of eavesdropping. There's joy and passion in the next room, in the next bed, but it's not yours.

Among other things, autoimmune disorders are an induction into a world of unstable information and no reliable expertise.

The common, the quotidian, is so much more unyielding to me, really stubborn and hard to work with, and I like this because it makes me think and it makes me worry. I can't just plunge my hand into the meat of it. I need new approaches.

Judaism to me, as badly as I practiced it, what I've always loved about it was its total embrace of complexity, its admission of unknowability.

My first book, 'The Age of Wire and String,' came out in 1995, and it was hardly reviewed at all.

I love the way dates in a text make us think that truth will follow.