It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.

We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.

I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.

Why did I think that this improvisation could never end? If I had seen that it could, what would I have done differently? What would he?

He meant doing things not because we were expected to do them or had always done them or should do them but because we wanted to do them

I wanted to get the tears out of the way so I could act sensibly.

I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response.

Every language has a grammar, a set of rules that govern usage and meaning, and literary language is no different. It’s all more or less arbitrary of course, just like language itself.

Conversion is the lifelong process of turning away from our plans and turning toward God's maddening, disruptive, creativity.

Madison Avenue is full of masochists who unconsciously provoke rejection by their clients. I know brilliant men who have lost every account they have ever handled.

There are many secrets; don’t try to resolve them all.

It's so natural you just fall into it and you find your way. It's terrifying and exciting, and brilliant.

It is an embarrassment that the dominant forms of matter in the universe remain hypothetical.

If we can't wake up to the fact that deep down inside we are good, then we deserve to remain asleep dreaming we are evil.

You can't send a girl in to do what a lady can do.

In my experience tact is usually worse than the brutalities of truth.

exaggerated sunsets / splashed with rain, odd collisions / of roots, animals, seeds. / I didn't like a thing I saw, / so much effort to be strange.