Nobody had forgotten anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn't like America where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time.

The nearest I'd come to feeling anything like God was the plan blue cloudless sky and a certain silence, but how do you pray to that?

without my wounds, who was I? My scars were my face, my past was my life.

Find someone who will tremble for your touch, someone whose fingers are a poem.

No matter where I was, my compass pointed west. I would always know what time it was in California.

It's not that he was going nowhere, it's that he'd already arrived.

We read so that we can be moved by a new way of looking at things.