When you stand outside, you look around and find that the people you're with live on the fringes.

I feel, holding books, accommodating their weight and breathing their dust, an abiding love. I trust them, in a way that I can't trust my computer, though I couldn't do without it. Books are matter. My books matter. What would I have done through these years without the library and all its lovely books?

The drugstore is a wonderful place to see all manner of ailments.

The city, no matter how small, is corrupt and unrepentant, while the sun shines brighter in the country, making people more wholesome.

If heaven is tolerant and writers are allowed (bunch of liars though they are), I wonder if they gather for coffee to ponder the prose they should have written instead.

We're seeing a decline in religion in North America but, I hope, a rise in individual spirituality. Whatever that means to people.

How cruel it must be for a man to live past his soul.