The wilderness does not make you forget your normal life so much as it removes the distractions for proper remembering.

Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness and they live by what they hear. Such people become crazy, or they become legends.

I did not want to live out my life in the strenuous effort to hold a ghost world together. It was plain as the stars that time herself moved in grand tidal sweeps rather than the tick-tocks we suffocate within, and that I must reshape myself to fully inhabit the earth rather than dawdle in the sump of my foibles.

Writers can write outside their ethnicity or sex depending how open and vulnerable they wish to be.

I don't know what psychotherapy does. I have been seeing the same person for 26 years now.

Everybody has a gun in their car in Detroit.

Suits obviously had helped to promote bad government and he was as guilty as anyone for wearing them so steadfastly for twenty years. Of late he had become frightened of the government for the first time in his life, the way the structure of democracy had begun debasing people rather than enlivening them in their mutual concern. The structure was no longer concerned with the purpose for which it was designed, and a small part of the cause, Nordstrom thought, was probably that all politicians and bureaucrats wore suits.