That afternoon I came to understand that one of the deepest purposes of intellectual sophistication is to provide distance between us and our most disturbing personal truths and gnawing fears.

To expect reason is where the fallacy lies.

People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake.

He looks like he could be taken in a fight. Not by me, but by somebody. Not anyone in Humanities, probably.

You just kind of have faith. If that sounds kind of mystical, it's because I really don't know how it works, but I trust that it does. I try to write the way I read, in order to find out what happens next.

People in small towns, much more than in cities, share a destiny.

Don't even the best and most fortunate of lives hint at other possibilities, at a different kind of sweetness and, yes, bitterness too? Isn't this why we can't help feeling cheated, even when we know we haven't been?