Literature can stop my heart and execute me for a moment, allow me to become someone else.

The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough.

I write about what I know; and I write about things that are new to me, and that I didn't know before.

The thing about love is that we come alive in bodies not our own.

Long ago, long ago. The simple things come back to us. They rest for a moment by our ribcages then suddenly reach in and twist our hearts a notch backward.

There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water - it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream.

There's a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we've left it.

We have to admire the world for not ending on us.

It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful.

Give life long enough and it will solve all your problems, including the one of being alive.

Even if people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, it didn't matter -- it was none of those things, he said, and it had to be fought for.

...in the business of writing what one accumulates is not expertise but uncertainties. Which is but another name for craft.

If we learn the most by our mistakes the wise have the most failures. While the timid and unfailing will always be missing true knowledge and perspective.

Everything had changed, and maybe she couldn’t keep up with it, but she still was good at making people regret they had ever crossed her way.

Shopkeepers —the great landed and commercial interests—regularly sat and slept, and where the two publicans occupied pews, but seldom made even the pretence of worshipping.

The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.

... habit starts at the second crime. At the first one, something is ending.

There's more fun in hunting with the handicap of the bow than there is in hunting with the sureness of the gun.

If you can perfect the booth, the stage and just your persona, like maybe in interviews and when people talk to you, then you're a full well-rounded emcee in my opinion.

The mealy look of men today is the result of momism and so is the pinched and baffled fury in the eyes of womankind.

You never know the answers to the questions of life until you are asked.