“I knew there was something holding me here. It wasn't paprikash. Or nostalgia for my meager childhood... ...Somewhere in me a nearly voiceless child was asking to know the rest of the story that had been interrupted.”

“Nostalgia is masochism and masochism is something masochists love to share.”

“It's still a mystery to me exactly how I learned the language. [But] I was 19 years old and I had very urgent things to tell girls.”

“There is a velvety sensuality here at the mouth of the Mississippi that you won't find anywhere else. Tell me what the air feels like at 3 A.M. on a Thursday night in August in Shaker Heights and I bet you won't be able to say because nobody stays up that late. But in New Orleans, I tell you, it's ink and honey passed through silver moonlight.”

“Telling a story to go with the meal is de rigueur, cher, it makes the food more memorable, and both meal and story get better when you sip that ice-cold Dixie beer.”

“The internet liquefied physical borders faster than they were already doing on their own. For all that, there are only regional writers. There are no "internet writers," like there used to be "paperback writers." Every tweet comes from somewhere, and that "somewhere" goes into the "somewhere" where you're reading it in. You read Nietzsche in the Ozarks for a while, let's say, then you get up and sweep the leaves from your porch for a longer while. Place wins on time spent every time, unless you're demented enough to put out your eyes on screens longer than you sweep. We are in a state of "transitional regionalism," a place where regions are instantly transmitted to other regions, but they don't universalize them, they only make them more provincial, by framing them with the local.”

“It is a sad fact that all flesh must die, but there is no reason why one's story, as well as one's soul, should be slighted after the passage. The attraction artists feel for our cemeteries is only partly aesthetic; much of it is gossip, a continual whisper intended for the delighted ear. Marble without a story is just marble. A true monument leans over and murmurs in your ear.”