I was read to as a small child, I read on my own as soon as I could, and I recall being more or less overwhelmed again and again - if not by what the books actually said, by what they suggested, what they helped me to imagine.

For me writing has always felt like praying even when I wasn't writing prayers.

You never know when you might be seeing someone for the last time.

Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable - which, I haste to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live.

I think the essence of family is that you have to agree to it, and then supply, out of your imagination and capacity for loyalty, the contents of it.

--"There is no justice in love...it is only the glimpse or parable of an incomprehensible reality... the eternal breaking in on the the temporal.

...not deciding to act would be identical with deciding not to act.