In our own beginnings, we are formed out of the body's interior landscape. For a short while, our mothers' bodies are the boundaries and personal geography which are all that we know of the world...Once we no longer live beneath our mother's heart, it is the earth with which we form the same dependent relationship, relying...on its cycles and elements, helpless without its protective embrace.

I have always kept notebooks and I go back to them over and over. They are my compost pile of ideas.

I prefer to have some beliefs that don't make logical sense.

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

The only answer to this, and it isn't an entire answer, said Father Travis, is that God made human beings free agents. We are able to choose good over evil, but the opposite too. And in order to protect our human freedom, God doesn't often, very often at least, intervene. God can't do that without taking away our moral freedom. Do you see? No. But yeah. The only thing that God can do, and does all of the time, is to draw good from any evil situation.

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.

History works itself out in the living.