Humility is not a virtue in a writer, it is an absolute necessity.

But perhaps age has taught me that the earth is still new, molten at the core and still forming, that black leaves in the winter forest will crawl with life in the spring, that our story is ongoing and it is indeed a crime to allow the heart's energies to dissipate with the fading of light on the horizon.

I looked at Lucas with the pang that a parent feels when he knows his child will be hurt and that it's no one's fault and that to try to preempt the rites of passage is an act of contempt for the child's courage.

How do you explain to yourself the casual manner in which you threw your life away?

And like most middle-aged people who hear the clock ticking in their lives, I had come to resent a waste or theft of my time that was greater than any theft of my goods or money.

I could only wonder again at the white race's naïveté in always sending forth our worst members as our emissaries.

When people make a contract with the devil and give him an air-conditioned office to work in, he doesn't go back home easily.