Getting a job scared her but she was determined not to shy away from risk. That's what life's all about. Climbing out onto the airplane wing and jumping off.

Love is like breathing, you take it in and let it out.

Hardest thing: creating something out of nothing - the first draft is torturous.

I thought about how love was always the thing that did that - smashed into you, left you raw. The deeper you loved, the deeper it hurt.

Connecticut is in my blood.

If you risked love, it took you wherever you wanted to go. If you repressed it, you ended up unhappy.

I am not a smart man, particularly, but one day, at long last, I stumbled from the dark woods of my own, and my family's, and my country's past, holding in my hands these truths: that love grows from the rich loam of forgiveness; that mongrels make good dogs; that the evidence of God exists in the roundness of things. This much, at least, I've figured out. I know this much is true.