Married life requires shared mystery even when all the facts are known.

Americans don't have saner gun laws because most Americans, including those citizens who puzzle over better angels, don't want saner gun laws.

The National Rifle Association is a domestic terrorist organization that tacitly supports the killing of children more than it supports reasoned gun legislation.

Something will be there when the flood recedes. We know that. It will be those people now standing in the water, and on those rooftops - many black, many poor. Homeless. Overlooked. And it will be New Orleans - though its memory may be shortened, its self-gaze and eccentricity scoured out so that what's left is a city more like other cities, less insular, less self-regarding, but possibly more self-knowing after today. A city on firmer ground.

Until you can become accountable to yourself and only yourself, you're probably not going to live a fully vital life. So much of literature is about accountability. The moral issues in most novels are about people becoming responsible for their own behaviour. One of the forces against being responsible for your own behaviour is the force of the past, in the way that the past tries to form you.

Very early you come to the realization that nothing will ever take you away from yourself.

I think once you love somebody, you love somebody; that's just how it is.