Good days, they come around the oddest corners.

Give life long enough and it will solve all your problems, including the one of being alive.

People are good or half good or a quarter good, and it changes all the time- but even on the best day nobody’s perfect.

One of those out-of-the-ordinary days that made sense of the slew of ordinary days. New York had a way of doing that. Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you...

We seldom know what echo our actions will find, but our stories will most certainly outlast us.

No shame in saying that I felt a loneliness drifting through me. Funny how it was, everyone perched in their own little world with the deep need to talk, each person with their own tale,...

We seldom know what we’re hearing when we hear something for the first time, but one thing is certain: we hear as we will never hear it again. We return to the moment to experience...

We could not have found peace unless the desire for it was already here.

I had enough electricity in my booty to jump-start the whole of New York City.

…and it strikes her, as she walks, that borders, like hatred, are exaggerated precisely because otherwise they would cease to exist altogether. 

I’m only telling you on the truth,” he said. “If you can’t stand the truth, don’t ask for it.

One look at each other and it was immediately understood that they both needed a clean slate,,, The obliteration of memory.

They told me Corrigan smashed all the bones in his chest when he hit the steering wheel. I thought, Well at least in heaven his Spanish chick’ll be able to reach in and grab his...

All this miraculous hatred. Christ, a man can’t eat his breakfast for filling his belly full of it.

We stumble on, thinks Jaslyn, bring a little noise into the silence, find in others the ongoing of ourselves. It is almost enough.

He’s at ease, his body sculpted to the music, his shoulder searching the other shoulder, his right toe knowing the left knee, the height, the depth, the form, the control, the twist of his wrist,...

We return to the lives of those who have gone before us, a perplexing mobius strip, until we come home, eventually, to ourselves.

Literature can stop my heart and execute me for a moment, allow me to become someone else.

Where happiness was not a possibility, the illusion of it was always more important.

Things in life have no real beginning, though our stories about them always do.

There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water–it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream. I was on the bottom...

I could tell from Anna’s face that she had already told him about dancing in Saint Petersburg and that the memory weighed on her heavily. What monstrous things, our pasts, especially when they have been...

Gloria laughed at them and said that she’d overtaken grief a long time ago, that she was tired of everyone wanting to go to heaven, nobody wanting to die. The only thing worth grieving over,...

Even if people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, it didn’t matter — it was non ov those things, he said, and it had to be fought for.

She wanted to tell him so much, on the tarmac, the day he left. The world is run by brutal men and the surest proof is their armies. If they ask you to stand still,...

The true nature of a democracy is its ability to say yes when even the powerful say no

Rather he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all...

His body, his mind, his soul, had, for years, served only for the profit of others. He had his own people to whom he was pledged. Three million. They were the currency of his freedom.

Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.

An optimist is a braver cynic.

Our father came to sleep in our house that night. He carried a small suitcase with a black mourning suit and a pair of polished shoes. Corrigan stopped him as he made his way up...

The Irish were poor, but not enslaved. He had come here to hack away at the ropes that held American slavery in place. Sometimes it withered him just to keep his mind steady. He was...

Memory has a heavy backspin, yet it’s still impossible to land exactly where we took off.

I’m not interested in blind optimism, but I’m very interested in optimism that is hard-won, that takes on darkness and then says, ‘This is not enough.’ But it takes time, more time than we can...

The world does not turn without moments of grace. Who cares how small.

There are no days more full than those we go back to.

It was as if they wanted to take their older bodies and put their younger hearts inside.

The luxury of age was the giving up of vanity.

Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrapy your mind around...

She expected no judgement and wanted no pity.

Harry had worked his way through the American Dream and come to the conclusion that is was composed of a good lunch and a deep red wine that could soar.

And there are moments that I would like to know what might have happened if it hadn’t happened, and why it happened the way it did, and what it might have taken to prevent it...

The repeated lies become history, but they don’t necessarily become the truth.

They say ol’ man Beach is crazy. And maybe he is. But he goes ahead anyways. He’s the sort of man who knows the only things worth doing are the things might break your heart.

There’s a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we’ve left it.