There is no such thing as a complete lack of order, only a design so vast it appears unrepetitive up close.

By writing I can live in ways that I could not survive.

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

I thought how we might have to yell to be heard by Higher Power, but that's not saying it's not there. And that is faith for you. It's belief even when the gods don't deliver.

Her clothes were filled with safety pins and hidden tears.

So many things in the world have happened before. But it's like they never did. Every new thing that happens to a person, it's a first... In that night I felt expansion, as if the world was branching out in shoots and growing faster than the eye could see. I felt smallness, how the earth divided into bits and kept dividing. I felt stars.

Death is the least civilized rite of passage.