Words are good for saying what things are, but sometimes they don't function for what things aren't.

Long ago, long ago. The simple things come back to us. They rest for a moment by our ribcages then suddenly reach in and twist our hearts a notch backward.

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

Good days, they come around the oddest corners.

I guess this is what marriage is, or was, or could be. You drop the mask. You allow the fatigue in. You lean across and kiss the years because they're the things that matter.

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 love short stories. They're like small imploding universes. They are very tightly bound and controlled. I'd been wanting to write one for ages but just got tangled up in novels. The novel is the same in the sense that it is also a universe, but it explodes outwards with all that shrapnel going in several different directions. I don't see too much difference in the forms except for the fact that writing short stories is like sprinting rather than long-distance running.