Death is the least civilized rite of passage.

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.

What is this life but the sound of an appalling love.

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

...Grandpa's mind had left us, gone wild and wary. When I walked with him I could feel how strange it was. His thoughts swam between us, hidden under rocks, disappearing in weeds, and I was fishing for them, dangling my own words like baits and lures.

The contents of a house can trigger all sorts of revisions to family history.

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.