We're here for such a short amount of time. Why do we spend any of it building sandcastles?

One thing about great art: it made you love people more, forgive them their petty transgressions. It worked in the way that religion was supposed to, if you thought about it.

But I suspect that all writers come up with premises of some kind, fragments of narrative or scenarios, in the course of a working week.

Several months later, and I have finally read one of the three (books), even though I wanted to read all three of them immediately. What happened in between? Other books, is what happened. Other books, other moods, other obligations, other appetites, other reading journeys.

We are never allowed to forget that some books are badly written; we should remember that sometimes they're badly read, too.

Love and charity share the same root word (caritas). How is that possible, when everything in our recent history suggest they cannot coexist, that they are antiethical, that if you put the two of them together in a sack they would bite and scratch and scream, until one of them is torn apart?

I suddenly had a little epiphany: all the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal.