Time itself is our tragedy and most of us are fighting some kind of war against it.

...[Cabeza de Vaca] ceased to be lost not by returning but by turning into something else.

Joy doesn't betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection.

I sometimes wonder what those of us who are writers would become in a nonliterary culture - storytellers? Hermits?

I was fifteen, and when I picture myself then, I see flames shooting up, see myself falling off the edge of the world, and am amazed I survived not the outside world but the inside one.

Books are solitudes in which we meet.

Too many of us seem far too fond of narratives of our powerlessness, maybe because powerlessness lets us off the hook... But we don't need everyone on board; we don't need one magic person in office; we need ourselves. To act. It's the wind, not the weathervanes.