Saints make wonderful grandfathers and lousy husbands.

I would always be a better hater of things and institutions than a lover of them.

The safe places could only be visited; they could only grant a momentary intuition of sanctuary. The moment always came when we had to return to our real life to face the wounds and grief indigenous to our homr by the river.

I learned that if I could read, I could cook. I surprised myself I like it.

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear. If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable. But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent.

Love had always issued out of the places that hurt the most.

A story is a living thing, it moves and shifts.