“My mother's voice and my father's fists are two bookends of my childhood, and they form the basis of my art.”

“As time passed from solstice to mild solstice in those occluded zones of my early childhood, I played beneath the distracted majesty of my mother's blue-eyed gaze. With her eyes on me I felt as if I were being studied by flowers.”

“Basketball allowed me to revere my father without him knowing what I was up to. I took up basketball as a form of homage and mimicry.”

“If not for sports, I do not think my father would have ever talked to me.”

“These are the quicksilver moments of my childhood I cannot remember entirely. Irresistible and emblematic, I can recall them only in fragments and shivers of the heart.”

“My irritation with Niles was growing, though. I had always thought the quiet man was the most overrated form of human life".”

“We children sat transfixed before that moon our mother had called forth from the waters. When the moon had reached its deepest silver, my sister, Savannah, though only three, cried aloud to our mother, to Luke and me, to the river and the moon, "Oh, Mama, do it again!" And I had my earliest memory.”