Water is the exile, carried back in cans and flasks, the ghost between your hands and your mouth.

From this point on, she whispered, we will either find or lose our souls.

It's a responsibility of the writer to get the reader out of the story somehow.

We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.

Research can be a big clunker. It's difficult to know how you can make the historical light.

A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands knowing it is something more than water. There is a plant whose heart, if one cuts it out is replaced with fluid containing herbal goodness. Every morning one can drink the liquid amount of the missing heart.

I love the performance of a craft, whether it is modest or mean-spirited, yet I walk away when discussions of it begin - as if one should ask a gravedigger what brand of shovel he uses or whether he prefers to work at noon or in moonlight. I am interested only in the care taken, and those secret rehearsals behind it. Even if I do not understand fully what is taking place.