Anyone can love a perfect place. Loving Baltimore takes some resilience.

There was no protection, no quota system when it came to luck. It was like that moment in math when a child learns that the odds of heads or tails is always one-in-two, no matter how many times one has flipped the coin and gotten heads. Every flip, the odds are the same. Every day, you could be unlucky all over again.

Would-be novelists need to bring equal parts arrogance and ignorance to the task before them. The arrogance is almost self-explanatory. Walk into any bookstore or library, calculate how many lifetimes the average person would need to read all the fiction contained therein. To think that one has anything to contribute, to any genre or tradition, takes genuine hubris.

It must be nice to be so strong and to think it's because you're so good, that you live right and eat right, so you deserve your health and happiness. But there is such a thing as luck, and there's more bad luck than good in this world.

There was nothing more dangerous than people convinced of their own good intentions.

I'm a morning person, which is a hideous thing to be. No one likes morning people, not even other morning people.

I had ancestors who were slave-holders, which is a difficult piece of family history to say the least. In a recent New York Times article on the subject of modern attitudes toward our slave-holding past, the writer noted that we all want to be from "innocent origins." I _know_ I'm not. Then again, I suspect most of us are not.