But I was beginning to intuit that full-blown maturity was not so very different from childhood. Both states in their extreme were all about following the rules.

You can call it innocence, or you can call it gullibility, but Celia made the most common mistake of the good-hearted: she assumed that everyone else was just like her.

In a country that doesn't discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable.

Time itself made all things rare.

Funny how the nature of a normal day is the first memory to fade.

Not that happiness is dull. Only that it doesn't tell well. And of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story.

...whenever a woman describes a man as sweet, the dalliance is doomed.

Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.

I thought at the time that I couldn't be horrified anymore, or wounded. I suppose that's a common conceit, that you've already been so damaged that damage itself, in its totality, makes you safe.

I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else's story.

My mind is huge with little stories that I never told you.

Well, in this world of basic stereotyping, give a guy a big nose and some weird hair and he is capable of anything.

Be good and you will be lonesome.

And though, truly, she sometimes felt like something inside her had disappeared, it seemed that must be a natural part of growing up. Standing out too much made one feel too alone to do it forever.

Ah, in work, love and the movies, everything is a fight.

You can be anything you want, but when you go against who you are inside, it doesn't feel good.

The sacredness, if there is any, is all in yourself and not in the place.

In '87 - four years after 'Sports' was released - my family and I began vacationing in Montana. I soon bought my first piece of land in Ravalli County, in the western part of the state.

Like a mermaid in sea-weed, she dreams awake, trembling in her soft and chilly nest.

Optimism is a competitive advantage.

I am trying to get closer to God.