Language is the ticket to plot and character, after all, because both are built out of language.

I want to be violated by insight.

We're all getting too smart. Our brains are just getting bigger and bigger, and the world dries up and dies when there's too much thought and not enough heart.

It is so often surprising, who rescues you at your lowest moments.

Many kids, it seemed, would find out that their parents were flawed, messed-up people later in life, and I didn't appreciate getting to know it all so strong and early.

As a writer you ask yourself to dream while awake.

Light is good company, when alone; I took my comfort where I found it, and the warmest yellow bulb in the living-room lamp had become a kind of radiant babysitter all its own.

…kissing George was a little like rolling in caramel after spending years surviving off rice sticks.

...a Dorito asks nothing of you, which is its great gift. It only asks that you are not there.

Mom flipped through the magazines like the pages needed to be slapped.

I admired that stride; it was like he folded space in two with it.

For some reason all the middle-aged women he knew were very efficient.

If I were making a country, I'd get the sewage pipes first, then the democracy, then I'd go about giving pamphlets and statues of Gandhi to other people, but what do I know? I'm just a murderer!

Early in the spring of 1750, in the village of Juffure, four days upriver from the coast of The Gambia, West Africa, a manchild was born to Omoro and Binta Kinte.

I'll bridge these hills with graceful arches

If we meet someone who owes us a debt of gratitude, we remember the fact at once. How often we can meet someone to whom we owe a debt of gratitude without thinking about it at all!

As soon as there was two there was pride.

Could it be that by protecting our kids from unhappiness as children, we’re depriving them of happiness as adults?

The cavity which suffering carves into our souls will one day also be the receptacle of joy.

Most men think indistinctly, and therefore cannot speak with exactness . . .

The way I understand gifts is that the giver must make a sacrifice, create an uneven exchange, bring himself closer to the recipient, create change and do it all with the right spirit.