When the clock stops on a life, all things emanating from it become precious, finite, and cordoned off for preservation. Each aspect of the dead person is removed from the flux of the everyday, which, of course, is where we miss him most. The quarantine around death makes it feel unlucky and wrong--a freakish incursion--and the dead, thus quarantined, come to seem more dead than they already are.... Borrowing from the dead is a way of keeping them engaged in life's daily transactions--in other words, alive.

There are so many ways to go wrong. All we've got are metaphors, and they're never exactly right. You can never just Say. The. Thing.

Read at the level at which you want to write. Reading is the nourishment that feeds the kind of writing you want to do.

We live in a moment and a culture when reading is really endangered. There's simply no way to write well, though, if you're not reading well.

I don't really know where my ideas come from. I start with a time and a place. That's what I need to get started, and an intellectual question.

I’m sorry and I believe in you and I’ll always be near you, protecting you, and I will never leave you, I’ll be curled around your heart for the rest of your life.

Americans are less selfish than some of our politicians believe and will respond with reason and resilience to passionate clarity.