Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure.

Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy.

But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to spread the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.

Last year, when Zora was a freshman, sophomores had seemed altogether a different kind of human: so very definite in their tastes and opinions, in ther loves and ideas. Zora woke up this morning hopeful that a transformation of this kind might have visited her in the night, but, finding it hadn't, she did what girls generally do when they don't feel the part: she dressed it instead.

(Feedback) People become addicted to it. That’s why journalism is so popular, because you want to hear, every day, what people think of what you just wrote. I think a little patience on that front can be good, too.

I'm a writer who never writes about sex. It's so far from my own fictional world.

Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.