I was eleven, the idea of two identical digits in my age still new and spectacular and heartbreaking. The girls must have felt this. They must have known. Where had ten, nine, eight, and seven gone?

Who hasn't walked through a life of small tragedies? 'Sister Sonja often asked me, as though to understand the depth and breadth of human suffering would be enough to pull me outside of my own.

Who hasn't walked through a life of small tragedies?

I know now that what is tragic isn’t the moment. It is the memory.

Maybe this is how it happened first for everyone —adults promising us their own failed future.

Creating a novel means moving into the past, the hoped for, the imagined. It is an emotional journey, fraught at times with characters who don't always do or say what a writer wishes.

I knew I was lost inside the world, watching it and trying to understand why too often I felt like I was standing just beyond the frame—of everything.

In the world, the disappointed or annoyed person seeks revenge

But this was what happened when you didn't want to visit and confront the past: the past starts visiting and confronting you.

No practice exists in isolation.

I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion.

Take a chance on me and I will prove how worthy your life is.

The principal act of courage is to endure and withstand dangers doggedly rather than to attack them.

[Sherlock Holmes:] The temptation to form premature theories upon insufficient data is the bane of our profession.

If there is any justice in this world, to be a White Sox fan frees a man from any other form of penance.

The cheapest gift I have to give is kindness, and it is the best.

Some of them relate to farts but they are not fart jokes. They would just be a fart in the joke but it's about something else.