She likes the people with the endurance to tolerate the drudge, the ones who know that pain is a requirement, not a curse.

Stories are the best democracy we have. We are allowed to become the other we never dreamed we could be.

We have to listen to other people's stories. That's the thing. And that's the only way that we eventually get to know ourselves.

He told me once that there was no better faith than a wounded faith and sometimes I wonder if that is what he was doing all along --trying to wound his faith in order to test it--and I was just another stone in the way of his God.

That's what sons do: write to their mothers about recall, tell themselves about the past until they come to realize that they are the past.

The luxury of age was the giving up of vanity.

The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough.