Within your own generation-the same songs, the same wars, the same attitudes toward those wars, the same rules and radio shows in the air-you can gauge the possibilities and impossibilities. With a person of another generation, you are treading water, playing with fire.

If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.

Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more and more.

How can the planet keep turning and turning and not get so bored it explodes?

In fact we do not try to picture the afterlife, nor is it our selves in our nervous tics and optical flecks that we wish to perpetuate; it is the self as the window on the world that we can't bear to thinkof shutting. My mind when I was a boy of ten or eleven sent up its silent scream at the thought of future aeons -- at the thought of the cosmic party going on without me. The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise of the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.

The muttered hint, "Remember, you have a stroke here," freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia.