Maybe, love is always forgiveness, to a degree.

Childhood is the province of the imagination and when I immerse myself in it, I re-create it as it was, as it could have been, as I wanted - and didn't want - it to be.

When my brother called to inform me, on the morning of May 22, 2003, that our mother Caroline Oates had died suddenly of a stroke, it was a shock from which, in a way, I have yet to recover.

The brain is a muscle of busy hills, the struggle of unthought things with things eternally thought.

The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.

I was trying not to be happy, hopeful. I did not believe I deserved happiness or even hope, if you knew my soul.

As a child. I grew up on a small farm, so I did a lot of drawings of animals, chickens and people. At the bottom of every page, I'd put a strange scribble. I was emulating adult handwriting, though I didn't actually know how to write.