Whenever summer rolls around I begin to realize that I'm a complete and utter book snob. In relation to reading, I have absolutely no guilty pleasures at all. No graphic novels. No murder mysteries. My summer read is really no different from my winter read. I know many bookshops and magazines would have me believe that our summer forays are different, but literature is literature, and unfortunately snobbery is snobbery.

He might have been naive, but he didn't care; he said he's rather die with his heart on his sleeve than end up another cynic.

Part of me really wants to believe that hope is entirely available to all of us. We don't have to embrace it. It would be sentimental and silly to say that we all need it, but it is absolutely available to all of us.

I sit there thinking about how much courage it takes to live an ordinary life.

The luxury of age was the giving up of vanity.

The job of the writer is to look at where he is now and make some sort of emotional sense of it, not only for that moment but for years to come.

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.