“I understand only that a vast void, an emptiness, is needing to be filled. O the things we grasp at.”

“He felt as if his heart had dried up. I needed her he thought. I needed someone like her to fill the void inside me. But I wasn’t able to fill the void inside her. Until the bitter end, the emptiness inside her was hers alone.”

“When I feel like shoveling in food, the emptiness can be filled only with love(April 2012, O Magazine)”

“All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.”

“It's the first thing I tell my students: If you could understand, really understand, that no one needs to read your work, then your writing would improve vastly by the time we meet in this classroom again.”

“We only labor to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void.”