We can change our wives,” he said. “We can change our jobs, our nationalities and even our religions, but we can never change our team.

Here in America, marriage still has a mystical, intangible power: It is a passport to adulthood and respectability and to a certain extent citizenship. Any relationship less than "married" is considered temporary and not worthy of honor.

We all seem to get this idea that, in order to be sacred, we have to make some massive, drastic change of character, that we have to renounce our individuality. To know God, you only need to renounce one thing - your sense of division from God

The beauty and variety of the natural world are merely the visible legacies of endless war.

You are accidentally leaving your DNA all over everything in a novel because it's all coming from you.

Devotion is diligence without assurance

When I read the article [in The New Yorker] by David Grann, I was very struck by people responding to the article, of people thinking I was such a hero and what a wonderful person I was, and I didn't feel that at all. I felt like I had very much, like Todd [Willingham], taken a path of self-preservation.