God enters the world through those of us who are willing to let God participate fully in our lives.

Who one believes God to be is most accurately revealed not in any credo but in the way one speaks to God when no one else is listening.

physical disability looms pretty large in one's life. But it doesn't devour one wholly. I'm not, for instance, Ms. MS, a walking, talking embodiment of a chronic incurable degenerative disease.

My writing arises out of erotic impulse toward an other: it is an act of love. And I want terribly to be loved in return, as a sign that I have loved well enough.

Poor and afflicted and oppressed people have faces, and we are required to look squarely into them. We can't love what we won't experience.

If the very thought of taking off all your clothes in the middle of the Washington Mall during a school holiday makes you blush, you haven't even begun to dream what it feels like to publish a book.

I will write myself into well-being.

The fact is that ours is the only minority you can join involuntarily, without warning, at any time. And if you live long enough, as you're increasingly likely to do, you may well join it.

Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, doubtless two of the most exquisitely adolescent of fictions.

In the grammar of the phallus -- the I, I, I -- [woman] can't utter female experience.

One of the blessings that comes with parental territory is that children tug you into experiences you're pretty sure you'd never otherwise contemplate.

That kind of monotony that running generates - the one soundtracked by heavy breathing and the steady rhythm of feet on pavements - became a kind of metaphor for depression.

She kept hoping that something would happen to rescue her from her own small-scale, predictable dreams.

I’d like to meet the devil some night, ’ he said once with a malignant smile. ‘I’d chase him from here to the wilds of the Pacific. I am the devil.

As seismologists gained more experience from earthquake records, it became obvious that the problem could not be reduced to a single peak acceleration. In fact, a full frequency of vibrations occurs.

There are certain people that you don't have to even work at extracting their inner life. It is just there and they're happy to share it with you.

To me, young has no meaning. It's something you can do nothing about, nothing at all. But youth is a quality. And if you have it, you never lose it.

A wave of weariness took him. How could life be so unrelentingly ugly?

I think basically lables were more interested in a Richard Page record than a Mr. Mister record.

Democracy and dependence on the military and police are incompatible.

Until the day when a wise black man can become our ambassador in Paris, we will forever be a pre-Brazil.