If I were a doctor nobody would be inviting me to talk to reservations. I'd be a different person. Writers can influence more people.

My father was sleepless most of his life. So by the age of five, I was awake with him all night long, watching bad television or we'd lie in the same bed, and I'd read my comic books while he read his latest spy or mystery novel.

And none of these people, not one of them, had loved any of the others well enough. Failures, he thought, we're all failures... He wanted his love to be the wine and bread, and the blood and flesh. He reached for her, a dangerous stranger in a city of dangerous strangers, but she turned away from him and walked unsteadily through the crowd. How many loveless people walk among the barely loved?

Everyone I have lost in the closing of a door the click of the lock is not forgotten, they do not die but remain within the soft edges of the earth, the ash of house fires and cancer in sin and forgiveness huddled under old blankets dreaming their way into my hands, my heart closing tight like fists. - "Indian Boy Love Song #1

It was so quiet, a reservation kind of quiet, where you can hear somebody drinking whiskey on the rocks three miles away.

she braided my sister's hair with hands that smelled deep roots buried in the earth she told me the old stories how time never mattered when she died they gave me her clock

I've learned that the worst thing a parent can do is ignore their children