Can’t you even tell me if I’m on the right track?" Buckminster purred, and Dad shrugged his shoulders again. "But if you don’t tell me anything, how can I ever be right?" He circled something in an article and said, "Another way of looking at it would be, how could you ever be wrong?

But come. No explaining or mending. Be beside me somewhere.

Think of the beginning of the story of the beginning of everything: Adam (without Eve and without divine guidance) names the animals. Continuing his work, we call stupid people bird-brained, cowardly people chickens, fools turkeys. Are these the best names we have to offer? If we can revise the notion of women coming from a rib, can’t we revise our categorizations of the animals that, draped with barbecue sauce, end up as the ribs on our dinner plates — or for that matter, the KFC in our hands?

My greatest fear is feeling like a professional novelist. Somebody who creates characters, who sits down and has pieces of paper taped to the wall - what's going to happen in this scene, or this act. What I like is for it to be a much more scary, sloppy reflection of who I am.

We live in a world made up more of story than stuff. We are creatures of memory more than reminders, of love more than likes. Being attentive to the needs of others might not be the point of life, but it is the work of life. It can be messy, and painful, and almost impossibly difficult. But it is not something we give. It is what we get in exchange for having to die.

Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled. Each second was two hundred yards, to be walked, crawled. You couldn't see the next hour, it was so far in the distance. Tomorrow was over the horizon, and would take an entire day to reach.

While it is always possible to wake a person who's sleeping, no amount of noise will wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.