It’s a race between your foolishness and your allotted days. Good luck.

Gone. The saddest word in the language. In any language.

Life isn't simple. Literature shouldn't be either.

Maybe I lacked coping skills. Maybe I was weak. I cared for people for no better reason than they seemed to care for me, acknowledge me. It didn’t seem so dangerous at the time.

Consider it: Who but God could have dreamed a tale so absurd and so heartless?

Kafka didn't save me. He just told me I was drowning.

I lost my father this past year, and the word feels right because I keep looking for him. As if he were misplaced. As if he could just turn up, like a sock or a set of keys.

...like a small stone deflected off a larger one, my brother had spun off toward the Almighty, though to my mind the events of that morning could just as well have cast him the other way.

The only thing your life teaches you is how to live your life. And that’s only if you’re very lucky. And you listen very hard.

I was raised to be ashamed of my ignorance, and to try to do something about it if at all possible.

I suspect that on some level, life is a matter of indefensible loyalties.

The fifties are a peaceful time, a quiet sleeping time between two noisy bursts of years, a blue and white time filled with sweet yellow days, music and bright smelling memories.

I was originally going to become a biochemist, but it just got way too complicated.

State control is important for the people who have always been excluded from the claims of social and economic development.

The small force that it takes to launch a boat into the stream should not be confused with the force of the stream that carries it along: but this confusion appears in nearly all biographies.

A new year reminds us that regardless of how often we fail or miss the mark, God freely offers opportunity to begin anew.

You have to use fantasy to show different sides to reality. That's how it can bend.

I hope all of us may eventually be together in everlasting peace and bliss -- except the inventor of the #‎ telephone .

True compassion is about not bruising the other person’s self-respect.

I keep reminding people that an editorial in rhyme is not a song. A good song makes you laugh, it makes you cry, it makes you think.

I didn't do anything wrong and I promise to never do it again.