Every time you hear a car alarm, Ruby said, another New Yorker has gone to hell.

There is nothing more lonely than a true artist.

Identity is your role in life, the part you play. Individuality is who you are, and who you are is revealed to you if you can get to complete presence.

Have some fun while you wait for the will of heaven.

Life is absolutely, mysteriously beautiful.

Books are in the mind, Grandfather Alessandro said. Too many books and you forget your body is in the world.

God made man because he loves to hear stories, Alessandro said. That's a good story, huh?

I was wounded by a blow of love.

It is precisely by binding things together that traditional visions perpetuate themselves and the prejudgments contained within them

You pay by the hour, even if the job only takes five minutes. I don’t do fractions.

This is what we do, my mother's life said. We find ourselves in the sacrifices we make.

It seems true that the growth of science and secularism made organized Christianity feel under threat.

There are days I drop words of comfort on myself like falling leaves and remember that it is enough to be taken care of by myself.

Mort(e) is wonderful and weird, never saccharine and always startling.

The budget evolved from a management tool into an obstacle to management.

Pray steal me not, I'm Mrs. Dingley's, Whose heart in this four-footed thing lies.

Know how your representatives stand on major national or state issues.

We would like to see, in the future, what we will probably call needs-based licensing of all weapons. ...Where it would make it much more difficult for anybody to be able to purchase handguns.