"I was asleep alone and he took my hand. He took my hand firmly and pulled me to go with him. And I pulled my hand out of his, half asleep as I was, not understanding. Then I woke. I wept and reached for him. . . . But he never returned."

"You're giving it all you've got when suddenly you feel the vibration—others' voices coming alive in your own throat. It is always strange and surprising when this happens, a rare moment of transcendence. The song is singing you."

"She was an old woman with brown, weather-beaten skin . . . Her hair was tightly woven into two long gray braids that fell on each side of a hump that rose like an unwanted burden in the middle of her back. Her wrinkled features embodied profound suffering. Tears rolled like rivulets down the deep creases of her checks."

"Sometimes waves rise like monsters out of the sea and we find ourselves grasping at grasshopper legs and pieces of hay, at anything that floats. It is in the grasping that we discover where safety actually lies."

"I'm not a fish, but I will be. And after that, an owl. When, if ever, will I be a naked woman, breathing, with no expectations? Will I live to be ninety? Do I want to? Will you tell me, you who lay there, beak hooked into silence?"

"You need a haircut," my mom said to me this morning. This wasn't an unusual statement, since she's always felt that I needed one—except my mom died years ago."

"I didn't know these people. What could I paint except their surfaces? . . . I was afraid that if I painted people without knowing them, or took their pictures, I would be treating them like objects in a still-life. Like curios, like animals in a zoo."

"You should have had a raucous Irish wake, the kind you see in movies. A bottle should have been passed from mourner to mourner, each telling stories about you, embroidering the details with each swig."

"A time may come when weekends are a welcome relief. Not because you need the rest or free time. No, because on weekends you don't have to feel bad about not having a job. "