The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.

To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives.

...hate suits him better than forgiveness. Immersed in hate, he doesn't have to do anything; he can be paralyzed, and the rigidty of hatred makes a kind of shelter for him.

I imagine most of that stuff on the information highway is roadkill anyway.

Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic un-interestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we're dead we're dead?

But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.

The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.