I had a very free childhood and ranged around on my bicycle the way boys do. I had few restrictions.

You never know where you're going to find the same thoughts in another brain, but when it happens you know it right off, just like you were connected by a small electrical wire that suddenly glows red hot and sparks.

Love won't be tampered with, love won't go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other.

The story comes around, pushing at our brains, and soon we are trying to ravel back to the beginning, trying to put families into order and make sense of things. But we start with one person, and soon another and another follows, and still another, until we are lost in the connections.

I tried out the unfamiliar syllables. They fit. They cracked in my ears like a fist through ice.

What men call adventures usually consist of the stoical endurance of appalling daily misery.

When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.