True gardeners cannot bear a glove Between the sure touch and the tender root.

For me the moral dilemma this past year has been how to make peace with the unacceptable.

when I am working I immediately feel hopeful.

My own feeling is that the only possible reason for engaging in the hard labor of writing a novel, is that one is bothered by something one needs to understand, and can come to understand only through the characters in the imagined situation.

Go rich in poverty. Go rich in poetry. This nothingness is plentitude.

we are never done with thinking about our parents, I suppose, and come to know them better long after they are dead than we ever did when they were alive.

Innocence is not pure so much as pleased, Always expectant, bright-eyed, self-enclosed