Writing my own novels in the ’90s…I never imagined that in ten years, science and rationality would require explanation and defense in a world rocked and ruled by religious fervor.
Watching him with one eye, she wondered if men ever figured out that they were more appealing when they were pursuing their own work than when they were pursuing a woman.
How can you hear your soul if everyone is talking?
His greatest satisfaction as a priest was to grant absolution, to help people forgive themselves for not being perfect, make amends, and get on with life.
Love is a debt, she thought. When the bill comes, you pay in grief.
And she laughed, a full octave, descending from high C like chimes.
The poor you will always have with you,’ Jesus said. A warning, Emilio wondered, or an indictment?
God’s got a lot of explaining to do. Of course, God never explains. When life breaks your heart, you’re just supposed to pick up the pieces and start all over, I guess.
My experience is that many things are not as bad as I thought they would be.
Emilio was certainly within his rights not to reveal the sordid details of his childhood even to his friends. Or perhaps especially to his friends, whose good opinion of him, he might feel, would not survive the revelations.
Wide is the gate and broad is the path that leads to destruction and many go that way
he had offered some of his own background. A youth in the South. An education in the North. Bred for life in the East. Trying not to die in the West.
When a man beats his boy, he wants a son who won’t buck him. He’s trying to make a coward. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it works.And the hundredth boy?We can go either way. Kill the old man, or try to become a better one.
If somebody honks a horn in Cleveland, they’re saying ‘Hi.’ It’s so rare to be honked at in anger. When we have merging traffic, we just interweave. There’s real courtesy.