If anyone ever asks you what panic is, now you can tell them: an emotional blank spot that leaves you feeling as if you've been sucking on a mouthful of pennies.

There will be water if God wills it.

Even at eleven, he had observed that things turned out right a ridiculous amount of the time.

In these silences something may rise

I wouldn't have missed a single minute of it, Not for the whole world.

I have spent a good many years since―too many, I think―being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all.

I can't understand why people use religion to hurt each other when there's already so much pain in the world.