Maybe you can make art out of unredeemed pain, but only if you're a genius -- Dostoyevsky perhaps.

Certainly on the vast windy plain, there was plenty of nothing to be looked at.

Texas is rich in unredeemed dreams

The Western notion of masculinity goes back a long way. It doesn’t allow for women, and it’s also racist - it doesn’t allow for other cultures.

A bookman’s love of books is a love of books, not merely of the information in them.

Through my college years, topping that ridge had always given me a great sense of being home, but time had diminished the emotion and I had begun to suspect that home was less a place than an empty page.

-she remembered them kindly, for there was a sweetness in boys that didn't last long, once they became men.