"The first thing I tried to do in the months after losing my mother was to write a poem. I found myself turning to poetry in the way so many people do - to make sense of losses. And I wrote pretty bad poems about it. But it did feel that the poem was the only place that could hold this grief."

"I have more enemies than I deserve,' I said. 'I am fighting a losing battle, me against the world. The next century is at stake. Time is running out and my optimism is sorely strained.'Yeah?' he said. 'I was young once too."

"We'll never find that one, and I'll be blamed,' announced Edd Tollett, the dour grey-haired squire everyone called Dolorous Edd. 'Nothing ever goes missing that they don't look at me, ever since that time I lost my horse. As if that could be helped. He was white and it was snowing, what did they expected."

"There are five stages to an actor's career: who is Herschel Bernardi? Get me Herschel Bernardi get me a Herschel Bernardi type get me a young Herschel Bernardi and who is Herschel Bernardi?"

"His yellow eyes were half-lidded as he sang, and in that golden moment, hanging taut in the middle of an ice-covered landscape like a single bubble of summer nectar, I could see how my life could be stretched out in front of me."

"Will stared down at his hands. 'My whole life wrecked, destroyed...' 'You're seventeen,' Magnus said. 'You can't have wrecked a life you've barely lived."

"Women were beyond me.They saw somethingdepraved.There was one waitressa little older thanI, she rather smiled,lingered when shebrought mycoffee.That was plenty for me, that wasenough.- Young in New Orleans."

"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."