You could hear the wind in the leaves, and on that wind traveled the screams of the kids on the playground in the distance, little kids figuring out how to be alive, how to navigate a world that wasn't made for them by navigating a playground that was.

I wouldn’t have a career if it weren’t for independent bookstores.

Home is Where the Heart Is, Good Friends Are Hard to Find and Impossible to Forget. True Love is Born from Hard Times.

The dead are visible only in the terrible lidless eye of memory.

He just waited until I stopped talking and said, 'Jesus, kid, you're almost a detective. All you need now is a gun, a gut, and three ex-wives. So what's your theory?

That is the fear: I have lost something important, and I cannot find it, and I need it. It is fear like if someone lost his glasses and went to the glasses store and they told him that the world had run out of glasses and he would just have to do without.

I kept it for myself like a keepsake, as if sharing the memory might lead to its dissipation.