She felt for a moment the child’s guilt and panic that she was to blame for something-for finally getting to know him. She that it wasn’t the getting to know him part that would convict her in the end. It was the finally.

But why did he remember only the things in life that had hurt him? Why couldn’t he remember the things that had given him joy or caused him to smile: the jokes he had heard, the songs that had made him lift his arms in the air, the people who had loved him, whose cheeks he had touched with his fingers?

The people were created in the image of God and thus they were within the precinct of His grace, even the ones who didn’t know Him... the ones who withdrew themselves from His presence.

I suppose that when you’re growing up, you’re bound to reach an age when you feel buffeted by all the changes in your life, when either your mind begins outpacing your body or your body begins outpacing your mind and you’re not quite in conversation with yourself anymore.

If your reading life and your friendships overlap, that’s just a nice coincidence – a case where the conversation you’re having with books and the conversation you’re having with actual human beings happen to dovetail.

There is funny ha-ha, and there is funny peculiar, and beneath a trapdoor in Kevin’s mind is a place where the two blur together, the place of jokes, churning so furiously frequently, when it kicks up a line, he has no idea what it will turn out to be.

The books you love best – those are the immensity of the sea.

I’m uncommonly slow to show my work to other people, and by the time I do I’ve usually exhausted myself so completely that all I really want is for someone to tell me that my efforts have added up to something – not one of my better qualities, I admit.

I always try to stay as quiet as possible about a book until it’s finished.

I don’t think our lives actually unfold with morals attached to them, or meanings that are easily extracted, or jokes designed to generate sympathy. I wanted to do the opposite – to offer up a life whose meanings can only be perceived through a tangle of desires, confusions, and textural details.