I work on one page, revising and polishing until I can't make it better, then move on to the next. Some pages might get 20 or more drafts before I move on.

If we were capable of thinking of everything, we would still be living in Eden, rent-free with all-you-can-eat buffets and infinitely better daytime TV programming.

Intuition is seeing with the soul.

We are all the walking wounded in a world that is a war zone. Everything we love will be taken from us, everything, last of all life itself. Yet everywhere I look, I find great beauty in this battlefield, and grace and the promise of joy.

Fear is a hammer, and when the people are beaten finally to the conviction that their existence hangs by a frayed thread, they will be led where they need to go.

He once told me that an August evening was "as hot as three toads in a Cuisinart," a comparison that left me blinking two days later.

It may sound strange, but when you're a kid and you're in that environment, for some reason for a long time you think, when the doors are closed in other houses, this is what it's like everywhere. And then at some point you begin to realize that isn't true, and books were really the educational system that showed me that there were many better and different ways to live a life.