“Slowly, I began to relearn something I’d once grasped but had lost sight of: that emotion—that central element of fiction—derives not from information or from explanation, nor from a logical arrangement of the facts, but specifically from powerful images and from the qualities of language: diction, rhythm, form, structure, association, metaphor. And sometimes I also had glimmers of another thing I’d once known: how effectively information can be used to wall off emotion.”

“We acquire both the language and religious concepts from our immediate culture – at the same time. A child cannot discriminate between useful survival information and the emotional and psychological manipulations of religion. Once infected, these ideas are deeply embedded and almost impossible to change.”

“I didn't know then that this was how deep emotion most often comes, from opposite directions and at once, when you are least aware and farthest from yourself.”

“I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.”

“I felt my muscles tensing as my body readied itself to flight—not fight—from whatever critter was about to spring free from beneath the branches and attack. I’d long since realized I was the type who’d always run. I’d grown up having a mother who’d continuously informed me there was no shame in living to flee another day.”

“The struggle is lost from the beginning, long before the victorious party or army conquers state power and ‘betrays’ its promises. It is lost once power itself seeps into the struggle, once the logic of power becomes the logic of the revolutionary process, once the negative of refusal is converted into the positive of power-building.”