There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto-God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger.... A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.

... survival is the least of my desires.

Babies change things, open doors you thought were shut, close others. Make you into something you never been.

stories are the one sure way I know to touch the heart and change the world.

Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different. Men eat themselves up believing they have to be the thing they have been made. Children go crazy. Really, even children go crazy, believing the shape of the life they must live is as small and mean and broken as they are told.

That was what gospel was meant to do - make you hate and love yourself at the same time, make you ashamed and glorified.

One of the strengths I derive from my class background is that I am accustomed to contempt.