Short story characters, mine anyway, are usually driven by impulse, not so much by their histories and the choices that they have to make.

The problem with love and God, the two of them, is how to say anything about them that doesn’t annihilate them instantly with the wrong words, with untruth. . . . In this sense, love and God are equivalents. We feel both, but because we cannot speak clearly about them, we end up–wordless, inarticulate—by denying their existence altogether, and, pfffffft, they die.

It's my feeling that any writer can get an emotion into a story without being sentimental as long as the emotion is dealt with honestly, with sufficient clarity, and detail.

There's nothing to talk about to strangers anymore, if you know what I mean. Everything I want to say, I say to her.

There is no weather in malls.

The point is that although love may die, what is said on its behalf cannot be consumed by the passage of time, and forgiveness is everything.

What a midwesterner he was, a thoroughly unhip guy with his heart in the usual place, on the sleeve, in plain sight.