All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers; our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.

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

We are cruel enough without meaning to be.

The stripped and shapely Maple grieves The ghosts of her Departed leaves. The ground is hard, As hard as stone. The year is old, The birds are flown.

A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.

Nothing seems to matter quite as much. I no longer think about death in the concentrated way I once did. I don't know? you get so old and you sort of give up in some way. You've had your period of angst, your period of religious desperation, and you've arrived at a philosophical position where you don't need, or you can't bear, to look at it.

Faith is not so much a binary pole as a quantum state, which tends to indeterminacy when closely examined.