My good intentions are completely lethal.

There's nothing like a shovel full of dirt to encourage literacy.

It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you're telling it, to yourself or to someone else.

But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.

And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends have been evasive about it, at the time.

The biggest debt is always the government debt; it's always debt that government has run up on your behalf.