Like faith, marriage is a mystery. The person you're committed to spending your life with is known and yet unknown, at the same time remarkably intimate and necessarily other. The classic seven-year itch may not be a case of familiarity breeding ennui and contempt, but the shock of having someone you thought you knew all too well suddenly seem a stranger. When that happens, you are compelled to either recommit to the relationship or get the hell out. There are many such times in a marriage.

Just the knowledge that a good book is waiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier.

They are fruit and transport: ripening melons, prairie schooners journeying under full sail.

I write what I would like to read.

Poets and monks... We're both sort of peripheral to the world.

In middle age we are apt to reach the horrifying conclusion that all sorrow, all pain, all passionate regret and loss and bitter disillusionment are self-made

I am learning to see loneliness as a seed that, when planted deep enough, can grow into writing that goes back out into the world.