“The whole time, I’d never seen, all you had spread before me. The whole time, I’d never seen, all I need was inside me. Now, I feel so different.”

“Remember what I told you. If they hated me, they will hate you.”

“How could I possibly know what I wanted, when I was only twenty-one?”

“Whatever it may bring, I will live by my own policies, I will sleep with a clear conscience, I will sleep in peace.”

“I’d never seen a man cry before, only on TV. I’d never even seen Dad close to crying. Those tears looked so odd on you. It was like the strength of you just seemed to sap away. The surprise of it stopped me from being so scared.”

“I love you," my mom says.I love you," my dad says.And all I say back is, "I love you."Because there isn't a fancy-or better- way of saying that.”

“The writer, without softening his vision, is obliged to capture or conjure readers. And this means any kind of reader. It means whatever is there. I used to think that it should be possible to write for some supposed elite, for the people who attend the universities and sometimes know how to read, but I have since found that though you may publish your stories in the Yale Review, if they are any good at all you are eventually going to get a letter from some old lady in California, or some inmate of the Federal Penitentiary, or the state in sane asylum, or the local poorhouse, telling you where you have failed to meet his needs. And his need of course is to be lifted up. There is something in us as story-tellers, and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance of restoration. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but he has forgotten the cost of it. His sense of evil is deluded or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. He has forgotten the price of truth, even in fiction.”