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.

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

The essence of intelligence was to know when, or if, to expose even the heart's deep need for instruction.

...it was necessary to love silence, but before you could love silence you had to have noise.

One small cloud, cast out by the herd, limps away to the west.

If you have a structure beforehand, you're sort of stuffing your story into a pre-assembled box. You don't want that to happen. What you want in your writing is to have a sort of wildness that occurs. And then, out of the wildness, a structure emerges.

The person we know at first, she thinks, is not the one we know at last.