It is always so simple, and so complicating, to accept an apology.

Rueful, bittersweet, funny, written with tenderness and bite, Merrill Feitell's stories, like so many classic short stories, are made from the plain and painful stuff of this world, and haunted by the possibility, and the impossibility, of a better one.

If children are not permitted-not taught-to be adventurers and explorers as children, what will become of the world...?

Man makes plans . . . and God laughs.

No; he could be ruined again and again by hope, but he would never be capable of belief.

There was something unmistakably exultant about the mess that Rosa had made. Her bedroom-studio was at once the canvas, journal, museum, and midden of her life. She did not “decorate” it; she infused it.

I wanted to give readers the feeling of knowing the characters, a mental image.