“There is nothing that is not both narrative and language. Even the paradoxical physics by which the universe is held together is both. We are ourselves story, just as we are language. That is the nature of both narrative and love.”

“Even as I learned to name the plants -- dogwood, five-fingered fern, mugwort -- I was stunned by the failure of language to reflect what I saw or felt.”

“Maybe story is just for the assembling of things -- history, imagination, fact -- without which . . . our lives will dissipate, losing meaning and coherence.”

“Numbers arrange themselves the way numbers will, just as a word will, a story.”

“Desire is story itself.”

“Story is revealed not in telling, but in listening.”

“In general, we imagine rivers to be subject to a kind of dynamic equilibrium, largely stable geologic features, with processes like regional incision or subtle shifts in mountain building causing short- and medium-term variation around some slowly changing mean condition, but in fact it is far more common to see dramatic change over short periods, with long periods of stability between in what geologists refer to as 'dynamic metastable equilibrium.'It is the same with families, memory, the history of a person's life, what we believe to be true.”