"...Required for good fiction: character, conflict, change through time. And if you're really blessed, you get resolution. But life doesn't usually work out that way."

"For if you try to forget yourself, force your heart and thoughts to become indifferent to the sight before you and take share of that entity which seems like one of the courses of the meal."

"Cliche but accurate: Kick a football, then ask it whether it meant to fly. All action demands an equal and opposite reaction. You can't blame an object battered by inertial forces; you can't blame me, bouncing through the pinball machine of life."

"I am evolving from being an animal,' he said. 'But it is going very, very slowly. Sometime I try to cry and laugh like other people, just to see if it feels like anything. Yet tears don't come. Laughter doesn't come."

"The Supreme Court has in place a legal structure which protects abortion rights in this country, and something has got to be done to change that before we can put in place truly meaningful protection for the unborn."

"All the accounts of the burial of Jesus are somber, laced through with the silence of grief, the shock that violence does to one's soul, even experienced vicariously in the body of another who is loved. They are written as though they are dirges, laments hidden in the silences and spaces between the words."