In order to go on with our lives, we are always capable of making the ominous into the merely strange.

... "You may not see the ocean, but right now we are in the middle of the ocean, and we have to keep swimming.

You can write about anything, and if you write well enough, even the reader with no intrinsic interest in the subject will become involved.

Many people find it easy to imagine unseen webs of malevolent conspiracy in the world, and they are not always wrong. But there is also an innocence that conspires to hold humanity together, and it is made of people who can never fully know the good that they have done.

At first, I spend about four hours a day writing. Toward the end of a book, I spend up to 16 hours a day on it, because all I want to do is make it good and get it done.

Public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.

And I can imagine Farmer saying he doesn't care if no one else is willing to follow their example. He's still going to make these hikes, he'd insist, because if you say that seven hours is too long to walk for two families of patients, you're saying that their lives matter less than some others', and the idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that's wrong with the world.