I don’t know why it is that I have always been happier thinking of somewhere I have been or wanted to go, than where I am at the time. I find it difficult to be happy in the present.

Books are living things and their task lies in their vows of silence. You touch them as they quiver with a divine pleasure. You read them and they fall asleep to happy dreams for the next 10 years. If you do them the favor of understanding them, of taking in their portions of grief and wisdom, then they settle down in contented residence in your heart.

Men are prisoners of their genitalia and women are the keepers of the keys to paradise.

I only hope to do well enough before I die to have a house as big as my rich Uncle Ed and Aunt Carole.

We children sat transfixed before that moon our mother had called forth from the waters. When the moon had reached its deepest silver, my sister, Savannah, though only three, cried aloud to our mother, to Luke and me, to the river and the moon, "Oh, Mama, do it again!" And I had my earliest memory.

Like everything else, love's not worth much without some action to back it up.

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