I'm ruined beyond repair, is what I fear...And if so, in time we'd both be wretched and bitter." "I know people can be mended. Not all, and some more immediately than others. But some can be. I don't see why not you." "Why not me?

There was a redemption of some kind, he believed, in such complete fulfillment of a desire so long deferred.

All I can say is that we are mistaken to gouge such a deep rift in history that the things old men and old women know have become so useless as to be not worth passing on to grandchildren.

But I believe the words entered me and changed me and still work in me. The words eat me and sustain me. And when I'm dead and in a box in the dark dark ground, and all my various souls have died and I am nothing but insensible bones, something in the marrow will still feel yearning, desire persisting beyond flesh.

Or maybe it is only that we are so habitually inattentive that when some rare but simple geometry grabs us by the shoulders and shakes us into consciousness, we call our response sacred.

I do the same things I did when I was 12 years old: I ride bikes, I read books, I walk in the woods. And I listen to music.

Writing doesn't come real easy to me. I couldn't write a novel in a year. It wouldn't be readable. I don't let an editor even look at it until the second year, because it would just scare them. I just have to trust that all these scraps and dead-ends will find a way.