It is the nature of walls that they should fall.

They believed that if a mouse found your hair clippings and built a nest with them you got a headache. If the nest was big enough, you might go mad.

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

It's not the one thing nor the other that leads to madness, but the space in between.

I choose this story above all others because it's a story I'm struggling to end.

What's invisible to us is also crucial for our own well-being.

And when I look at a history book and think of the imaginative effort it has taken to squeeze this oozing world between two boards and typeset, I am astonished. Perhaps the event has an unassailable truth. God saw it. God knows. But I am not God. And so when someone tells me what they heard or saw, I believe them, and I believe their friend who also saw, but not in the same way, and I can put these accounts together and I will not have a seamless wonder but a sandwich laced with mustard of my own.