Pain collected into deep pockets and I was aware of this painbut somehow I could not seem to feel it. It was like a body-deafness.

The beginning of the end can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it.

When you're a kid, it's hard to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill you if you keep them.

Fiction helps me to reconnect with the true, deep weirdness inherent in everyday reality, in our dealings with one another, in just being alive.

It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity.

My older sister has entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them are only accessible at certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather.

I spent most of my 20s with these alligator wrestlers in the swamps of South Florida.

It is a special kind of homelessness to be evicted from your dreams.

Self-disciplin e is necessary, but so is playfulness, flexibility, joy. When you stop demanding perfection of yourself, your writing desk will become a spacious place.

There are certain prehistoric things that swim beyond extinction.

You small mortals don't realize the power of your stories.

A dull, decent people, cherishing and fortifying their dullness behind a quarter of a million bayonets.

Never throw fruit at someone who understands the theatrics of the situation better than you do.

I never really made any money and it certainly cost me more to take photographs than I got for them.

My life provides me with these images that become expressions of my daily experience.

Ministry means the ongoing attempt to put one's own search for God, with all the moments of pain and joy, despair and hope, at the disposal of those who want to join this search but do not know how.

All things in this world must be seen with youthful, hopeful eyes.

We owe it to our kids to inform them and train them how to think, not what to think.

Never a daisy that grows, but a mystery guideth the growing; Never a river that flows, but a majesty scepters the flowing.

Even if you're an adult you still have secrets and scandals following you.

Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious.