The library was quiet. It was busy but it was quiet and I thought it must be like this in a monastery where you had company and sympathy but your thoughts were your own.

Why is the measure of love loss?

Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?

...there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you.

Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out.

Six books… my mother didn’t want books falling into my hands. It never occurred to her that I fell into the books – that I put myself inside them for safe keeping.

Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won't help you.

Where you are born--what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own-- stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say.

Memory loss is one way of coping with damage.

To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.

We bury things so deep we no longer remember there was anything to bury. Our bodies remember. Our neurotic states remember. But we don't.

Trying to please everybody is what you'll soon get tired of, because as time goes on, those you're pleasing will get tired of you.

Don't aim for perfection. Aim for 'better than yesterday'.

Billy squinted at me. "Why are you letting them go?""Because they're real.""How do you know?""The one I was holding crapped on my hand.

The crazy game of pilling stones was also in you and your friends’ marvelous innovation. And how really hard you would hit the phony big guy who you hated like anything.

I bet they love those games on Friday night more than they do segregation.

They told me I had been sick twelve days, lying like dead all the while, and that Whirlwind Chaser, who was Standing Bear's uncle and a medicine man, had brought me back to life.

I don’t know why we do it. But sometimes we just swim straight for the net.

I was in love with a whirlwind, so when the girl threw me over, I went home and finished my novel.

Every claim creates an obligation.