The words and sentences you take into your body from books are no less sacred and healing than communion. Surely at least one such person lives in your zip code.

Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild.

Every now and then we enter the presence of the numinous and deduce for an instant how we're formed, in what detail the force that infuses every petal might specifically run through us, wishing only to lure us into our full potential.

I think we fall in love and become adults and become citizens in a way by writing stories about ourselves.

He never gave up on me, I only stopped being matriculated.

Age about 30, I stopped looking up my books in bookstores. Paying attention to the marketplace isn't a healthy thing for me.

I'm bred for farm work, and for such folk, the only A's you get come from effort. Strife and strain are all the world can offer, and they temper you into something unbreakable because Lord knows they'll try -- without let up -- to break you.