Schools must stop being holding pens to keep energetic young people off the job market and off the streets. We stretch puberty out a long, long time.

...a habit that had become one of those necessary things for the night... surely a body-friendly if not familiar-lying next to you. Someone whose touch is a reassurance, not an affront or a nuissance. Whose heavy breathing neither enrages nor discusts you, but amuses you like that of a cherished pet.

How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it.

I don't think I knew any of my father's friends - male friends - by their real names. I remember them only by their nicknames.

We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.

The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers.

Writing is really a way of thinking--not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.