“Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air.”

“History was like an old house at night. With all the lamps lit. And ancestor whispering inside. To understand history, we have to go inside and listen to what they're saying. And look at the books and the pictures on the wall. And smell the smells.”

“Survival often depends on a specific focus: A relationship, a belief, or a hope balanced on the edge of possibility. Or something more ephemeral: the way the sun passes through the hard seemingly impenetrable glass of a window and warms the blanket, or how the wind, invisible but for its wake, is so loud one can hear it through the insulated walls of a house.”

“I prepare my portrait for my woman to hang on a wall when I die.she says: Is there a wall to hang it on?I say: We'll build a room for it. Where? In any house.”

“Fill your head with the right pictures of me. Fill your head with the ones you'd hang on the wall.”

“I pictured a low timber house with a shingled roof, caulked against storms, with blazing log fires inside and the walls lined with all the best books, somewhere to live when the rest of the world blew up.”