You can't blame a writer for what the characters say.

all his prayers of the past had been simple concrete requests: God, give me a bicycle, a knife with seven blades, a box of oil paints. Only how, how, could you say something so indefinite, so meaningless as this: God, let me be loved.

The wind is us-- it gathers and remembers all our voices, then sends them talking and telling through the leaves and the fields.

Everybody has to feel superior to somebody," she said. "But it's customary to present a little proof before you take the privilege.

you got to want it to be good, and I don't want it.

Reading dreams. That's what started her walking down the road. Every day she'd walk a little further: a mile, and come home. Two miles, and come home. One day she just kept on.

My major regret in life is that my childhood was unnecessarily lonely.