One of the nice things about our marriage, at least to my way of thinking, is that my wife and I no longer have to argue every thing through. We each know what the other will say, and so the saying becomes an unnecessary formality. No doubt some marriage counselor would explain to us that our problem is a failure to communicate, but to my way of thinking we've worked long and hard to achieve this silence, Lily's and mine, so fraught with mutual understanding.

I'll tell you one thing, though. It's a terrible thing to be a disappointment to a good woman.

Even at its most perceptive, sociology deals in abstractions.

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.

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?

Stories worked much the same way . . . A false note at the beginning was much more costly than one nearer the end because early errors were part of the foundation.

Bookstores, like libraries, are the physical manifestation of the wide world's longest, most thrilling conversation.