I don't think America has ever had a center the way London is the center of England or Dublin is the center of Ireland.

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?

If there's an enduring theme in my work, it's probably the effects of class on American life.

My God, he couldn't help thinking, how terrible it is to be that age, to have emotions so near the surface that the slightest turbulence causes them to boil over. That, very simply, was what adulthood must be all about -- acquiring the skill to bury things more deeply. Out of sight and, whenever possible, out of mind.

Was anything in the world truer than that intuitive leap of the heart?

Odd that the future should be so difficult to bring into focus when the past, uninvited, offered itself up so easily for inspection.

Steve Yarbrough's Safe from the Neighbors will take your breath away. Ambitious, funny, sad, smart, and beautifully crafted, it's everything a novel should be.