I come from a family of great readers and storytellers.

Pretty things will swarm you like that, like your heart was a hive of electric bees.

I remember, in hot floods, the way he slept, still as death, with his face washed flat, stony as a carved tomb and exquisite. His weakness and his ravening bitter needs were terrible, and beautiful, and irresistible as an earthquake. He scalded or smothered anyone he needed, but his needing and the hurt that it caused me were the most life I have ever had. Remember what a poor thing I have always been and forgive me.

I am here, come closer," the old donkey said with her eyes. "I will mother you.

There are parts of Texas where a fly lives ten thousand years and a man can't die soon enough. Time gets strange there from too much sky, too many miles from crack to crease in the flat surface of the land.

Were also far enough from the publishing power that we have no access to the politics of publishing, although there are interpersonal politics, of course.

We survive until, by sheer stamina, we escape into the dim innocence of our own adulthood and its forgetfulness.