I don’t know what I mean, but I know I believe it.

They represent the most dangerous kind of shape changers: those who cannot see, because of darkness beyond the gesture of the moment.

What do you do with everything that is cut away?” she asked Tilman, thinking now about the negative space of stone sculpture, the stone that is discarded, thinking too about how she had thrown away huge pieces of her own early life...

Get drunk, Austin, have a love affair. It would be a tragedy to die and discover that you hadn’t completely used up your body.

Longing for something that you once had is a mistake because the pictures in your mind are never the same as whatever it is you are longing for.

Racism is a destructive and artificially-manufactured element in the collective human psyche designed to fragment the natural desire of human beings to know and love one another.

What do you do with everything that is cut away?" she asked Tilman, thinking now about the negative space of stone sculpture, the stone that is discarded, thinking too about how she had thrown away huge pieces of her own early life...

The women of this family leaned towards extremes.

The lake was a shield of beaten brass flung down in the valley under a full sun.

The string of bright beads, he had told her, were to remind her of the twenty brightest days they had spent together, and a promise of twenty more, and then twenty more, infinitely. Even in old age she would be able to call to mind the sound of the word "infinitely", the music it made, coloured by the slight Irish accent in his mouth - a word that whether shouted, sung, or spoken, sounded always like a tender whisper.