It was a completely new feeling for me–like someone had just released a million, tiny butterflies loose in my stomach, and they were feverishly flying up into my head and making me lose my mind.

People like to complain about the state of contemporary literature, but I can only assume they don't read it very widely.

Life didn’t go how I had planned, but I couldn’t have planned a better life. Somewhere in between the beginning and eternity, I fought the war that we all must fight–the journey that in taking, forces us to come face to face with our own realities.

A great novelist excels on the small scale and the large, the individual leaf and root as well as the forest; good fiction convinces us that the imaginary is real by selecting exactly the right detail and rendering it perfectly.

A faint smell of lilac filled the air. There was always lilac in this part of town. Where there were grandmothers, there was always lilac.

Perfect love was that kind of love that made no sense but made everything else make sense somehow. It was raw and unscripted, turbulent and slightly unpredictable.

In the year since we brought things into the open with a clean breath of fresh air at City Hall, we have learned about corrupt spending practices and unethical conflicts of interest that waste your money... and keep Dallas from being the great city of our dreams.