When small towns find they cannot harm the strangest of their members, when eccentrics show resilience, they are eventually embraced and even cherished.

It is easy to take away the world that we think is so permanent and reliable.

What happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough? It becomes your entire history.

Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness.

some people meet the way the sky meets the earth, inevitably, and there is no stopping or holding back their love. It exists in a finished world, beyond the reach of common sense.

Now that I knew fear, I also knew it was not permanent. As powerful as it was, its grip on me would loosen. It would pass.

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