Outside, there was that predawn kind of clarity, where the momentum of living has not quite captured the day. The air was not filled with conversation or thought bubbles or laughter or sidelong glances. Everyone...

One cannot spend one’s entire life running into bathrooms when danger calls!

This was the curse of the voracious reader, she realized. Real life never quite measured up to the heightened and precise contours of her literary worlds. A real war was never as true as a...

I had trouble listening to adults who didn’t really mean anything that they said; it was as if their language poured into my ears only to drain right out a little spigot in the back...

Society was the only threat to the sanctity of selfhood: an unpatroned library was an orderly library.

Adults were pack rats of old, useless emotions.

A map does not just chart, it unlocks and formulates meaning; it forms bridges between here and there, between disparate ideas that we did not know were previously connected.

Instead of falling to the ground like a heavy doll, as Kermin had seen the prisoners do at the Chetnik executions, his mother shrank into herself, a reverse blossoming, coming to rest in a sitting...

I’m a practicing Zen Buddhist and I’m influenced by my readings in that tradition, such as the notion that everyone is born a perfect being and we spend most of our lives with a clouded...

A novel is a tricky thing to map.

Were I to spend my life commenting on the world that I see, I would never see the world.