I'm kind of a mash-up of taste - Graham Greene and Jane Austen; W.G. Sebald and Alice Munro.

[s]he was a compulsive pessimist, always looking for the soft brown spot in the fruit, pressing so hard she created it.

In life, redemption was walking up the down escalator: stop to congratulate yourself, and back you slid.

Religious speech is extreme, emotional, and motivational. It is anti-literal, relying on metaphor, allusion, and other rhetorical devices, and it assumes knowledge within a community of believers.

Perhaps this was the secret to being at peace: want nothing but what is given to you.

Jealousy clings to love's underside like bats to a bridge.

Sorrow can be a bully.

The September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon prompted a fundamental shift in the American government's approach to Islamic terrorism.

There were in life rarely, if ever, "right" decisions, never perfect ones, only the best to be made under the circumstances.

Nothing in life gets dropped without someone else having to pick it up.

Fabricating reality was criminal; editing it, commonplace.

Between the lines of every book the writer reveals their own secrets.

We must always remember that the Lord called us before we were born

Regrets, Blacksmith, make poor currency. You can't but back with them what you most desire.

Without charity, there is no salvation.

Language helps form the limits of our reality.

Whoever is holding the power says, "Yeah, let's keep things civil and quiet." Whoever's outside say's, "No, I'm not going to keep things civil and quiet, I'm going to bang on the door."

May my soul bloom in love for all existence.

I find that in the 21st century, there's not a lot of compassion for what other people are going through or the walk that they have to walk.

The aging and declining population will have far-reaching impacts. Declining fertility rates will possibly increase immigration. The structure of family and society will inevitably change.

First it must be known that only a spoken word or a conventional sign is an equivocal or univocal term; therefore a mental contentor concept is, strictly speaking, neither equivocal nor univocal.