Eastern Connecticut is very different from Western; we're more liverwurst than pâté, more bowling than polo.

So many bad things have happened to them that they can't trust the good things. They have to shove them away before someone can get it back.

A woman who surrenders her freedom need not surrender her dignity.

Eastern Connecticut is very different from Western; we're more liverwurst than pâté, more bowling than polo.

My soul was a burden, bruised and bleeding. It was tired of the man who carried it, but I found no place to set it down to rest. Neither the charm of the countryside nor the sweet scents of a garden could soothe it. It found no peace in song or laughter, none in the company of friends at table or in the pleasures of love, none even in books or poetry.... Where could my heart find refuge from itself? Where could I go, yet leave myself behind?

Fiction writing is a strange business when you think about it. You sit down and weave a network of lies to explore deeper truths.

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.