We've pretended too much in our family, Luke, and hidden far too much. I think we're all going to pay a high price for our inability to face the truth.

But no one walks out of his family without reprisals: a family is too disciplined an army to offer compassion to its deserters.

When men talk about the agony of being men, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of self-pity. And when women talk about being women, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of blaming men.

It is the secret life that sustains me now, and as I reach the top of that bridge I say it in a whisper, I say it as a prayer, as regret, and as praise. I can't tell you why I do it or what it means, but each night when I drive toward my southern home and my southern life, I whisper these words: 'Lowenstein, Lowenstein.

Fantasy is one of the soul's brighter porcelains.

I was trying to unravel the complicated trigonometry of the radical thought that silence could make up the greatest lie ever told.

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