What if all everybody needed in the world was to be sure of one friend? What if you were the one, and you refused to say those simple words?

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.

Some authors have a very hard time understanding that in order to be faithful to the spirit of the book, it's almost always impossible to remain faithful to the text. You have to make changes.

It's possible to overlook character flaws of in-laws for the simple reason that you feel neither responsible for them nor genetically implicated.

As I drift back into sleep, I can't help thinking that it's a wonderful thing to be right about the world. To weigh the evidence, always incomplete, and correctly intuit the whole, to see the world in a grain of sand, to recognize its beauty, its simplicity, its truth. It's as close as we get to God in this life, and reside in the glow of such brief flashes of understanding, fully awake, sometimes for two or three seconds, at peace with our existence. And then back to sleep we go.

They stayed, many of them, because staying was easier and less scary than leaving.

Worse, I have to admit to feeling the jealousy of one crab for another that has managed to climb out of the barrel.