I've heard it said that when you die you enter a room of bright light, and that you can smell bread baking just around the corner.

The seams, the laminae between the various worlds the past present and future as well as the living and the nonliving may not be as distinct and clear-cut as we have been taught or as our somewhat arbitrary clocks and calendars have led us to believe.

How we fall into grace. You can't work or earn your way into it. You just fall. It lies below, it lies beyond. It comes to you, unbidden.

There are none among us who have not been, even for a moment, cruel to those whom we love most, as if unable, in that moment, to shoulder any longer the magnificent weight and burden, the responsibility, of that love.

I don't think I'm a natural novelist. Plot is definitely one of my weaker points. I've been working on it a long time, and it's not getting much better.

The natural world is the only one we have. To try to not see the natural world - to put on blinders and avoid seeing it - would for me seem like a form of madness. I'm also interested in the way landscape shapes individuals and populations, and from that, cultures.

Live long enough and all weaknesses will be illuminated, but again perhaps that is not all bad for cannot they then begin to become strengths?