“Shame is a function of sight. When a citizen of streets walks through the ravine, unwatched, he can choose to take his propriety with him. He can police himself. He might choose to do this: to carry his shame with him, in the form of guilt. Then again, the permutations available to the mind in the ravine are infinite.

The first bitter story ever told was precisely this one; the crime of the usurper. We pretend to have knowledge that is not rightfully ours. We make something, believing that we have mastered what we have merely stolen. Finally, what we make takes vengeance upon us, and we are forced to confront the truth, which is in fact no different from the original mystery: that we know very little.

I have spent a long time wondering about permanence: whether the soul can sustain irreparable damage, and how this might limit the notion of free will. Whether the psychologists are correct or not—and I am sure they are mostly not—we do carry our families with us, until death; and if our families are broken we carry the breakage in our soul.

Nothing religious is ever destroyed by logic; it is destroyed only by God's withdrawal.

All the stories feeding into my life are fragmenting the integrity of my voice; I hear myself telling other people's stories as if they were my own, and I feel certain that there are people out there, people I hardly know, telling mine. I am a confluence of stolen narratives, and my own story has been stolen too and fed through a foreign mouth into foreign ears.

There is no moments beauty in those whom we have loved for a long time. We do not admire them, the way we do some chance woman or man on the subway as a moment's appearance of perfection in the physique. We see them as a montage of every remembered moment, the present moment often more vivid and strong than those receding into the past, but a montage nevertheless. If we remember.”