...the clear water the color of deeply steeped tea, surrounded by cattails and gracile grasses.

... instead of spelling stories you spread silence, which was outside the alphabet.

I didn't know then that the mind, like the earth, has several layers: a crust, a mantle, a boiling core.

Finally the dawn came, the sky fringed with pink, and the sun bright as a coin in a spill of rising red.

...tethered to the ground by quotidian conversation.... the window rosy with anemic November light.

It is a fundamental misperception, " Fouts says to me, "to think human life has more value than any other life form.

There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.

The problem with being a modern woman, I thought, as the front door swung wide, is that you have to pretend to be stronger than you are.

We need to be reminded more than we need to be instructed

The minute you begin to have doubts, the floor under your feet starts to shake.

You can't fake passion. It is the fuel that drives any dream and makes you happy to be alive.

I can establish the expectation of retributive justice. Have we done that? No.

To matter, to mind. ... What we mind is in our power, but whether we matter may not be - and there's the tragedy. ... Can anyone truthfully say, I don't matter and I don't mind?

I would argue that in times of war, sealed lips sink entire democracies. If we don't have access to vital information, we lose everything.

The gospel shows a God far more holy than the legalist can bear, yet far more merciful than a humanist can conceive

Once the song is done and recorded, I like to go back and then cut the drums, because then I know exactly what the song needs, and what it doesn't need.