I told him that I loved him and that I'd always love him and I felt like a child who throws a centavo into a fountain and then she has to tell someone her most extraordinary wish even though she knows that the wish should be kept secret and that, in telling it, she is quite probably losing it. He replied that I was not to worry, that the penny could come out of the fountain again and again and again.

There's a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we've left it.

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.

...and it strikes her, as she walks, that borders, like hatred, are exaggerated precisely because otherwise they would cease to exist altogether.

People think they know the mystery of living in your skin. They don't. There's no one who knows except the person who carts it around her own self.

Corrigan told me once that Christ was quite easy to understand. He went where He was supposed to go. He stayed where He was needed. He took little or nothing along, a pair of sandals, a bit of a shirt, a few odds and ends to stave off the loneliness. He never rejected the world. If He had rejected it, He would have been rejecting mystery. And if He rejected mystery, He would have been rejecting faith.

Part of the beauty of fiction is that we come alive in a body that we don't own.