We all got holes in our lives. Nobody dies in a perfect garment.

Time is the water in which we live, and we breathe it like fish. ... Time pours into us and then pours out again. In between the two pourings we live our destiny.

Here is the most telling fact: you wish to possess me.
 Here is another fact: I loved you and let you think you could.

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.

i want to hear what's happened to you," she said evenly after a while. she gestured in the direction, down river, of the butcher shop. "it's just that there is nowhere else to start," she said gently. "niether of us is the same. but i'm different because of small, good, manageable things. you're different because ... things i don't know.

It kills your writing if you try to manipulate it with crude politics.

To be of mixed blood is a great gift for a writer. I have one foot on tribal lands and one foot in middle-class life.