Synesthesia has interested me for a long time, both as a literary device and as a puncturing of the membranes that organize how the world comes into someone's head.

The act of language or the act of denying language carries its own heaviness.

Giving the reader the space to move around and be active, and encourage their active response is important to me. That will connect the reader more to the text.

There's relief in white space for the reader.

I have what I came to find in my research is a mild form of synesthesia, though I never would have labeled it as such. It's how I think about numbers and letters. They all have inherent genders.

For me, the genders are an essential element of numbers and letters, not something that could be removed from them.

If a synesthetic person says the letter a is green, it can't ever be anything but green.

I'm always interested in encountering people who are synesthetic and seeing how they experience things.

I find myself writing protagonists who do feel pretty cut off from others but who want to make connections and aren't very good at it.

Even in so-called realist or conventional writing there can be defamiliarization.

I don't know whose sensibility I'm responding to. Until someone starts pushing against what they've inherited and starts making their own decisions about language, it's difficult.

A sinner’s humanity will cause him to fall from grace again and again, but his human pride, ego, or feeling of unworthiness should not prevent him from seeking God’s forgiveness again and again.

He hoped that none of his descendants would get mixed up in politics, which was a trade for butchers and bandits.

You're not perfect, but you're not your mistakes.

Iowans are super talkative, like me. I'm very talkative. I'm very curious about strangers.

When something weighs on your conscience, give it up.

Passivity may be the easy course, but it is hardly the honorable one.

I believe if you’re going to bomb someone you should know them first. It should hurt when you kill someone.

I will always be the older sister. That's never going to change.

If America becomes militant, it will be because its people choose to become such; it will be because they think that war and warlikeness are desirable.

We are never so much disposed to quarrel with others as when we are dissatisfied with ourselves.