Ideally, I would create a book so interdependent and self-sustaining in its parts, so wondrously connected word by word and paragraph by paragraph, so charged with the joy of language, that it would actually float three or four inches above any table where you try to set it down.

I liked the place I came from. But a lot of what I liked about it was that I had come from there.

God, in the orthodox view, causes famine, plague, and flood. Was God evil? Evil is a convenient fiction.

The world is full of ghosts, and some of them are still people.

These days, there are a great many books about childhood trauma and its effects, but at the time all the experts agreed that one should forget about it as quickly as possible and pick up where you left off.

Wolf! Right here and now!

In violence there is often the quality of yearning - the yearning for completion. For closure. For that which is absent and would if present bring to fulfillment. For the body without which the wing is a useless frozen ornament. ("A Short Guide To The City")