"The interior life expands and fills; it approaches the edge of skin; it thickens with its own vivid story; it even begins to hear rumors, from beyond the horizon skin’s rim, of nations and wars. You wake one day and discover your grandmother; you wake another day and notice, like any curious naturalist, the boys."

"Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation's short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit."

"What I call innocence is the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration."

"I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers."