And the people next door oppress me all night long. I tell them, I work all day, a man's got to have some time to learn to play the tuba. That's oppression, that is. If I'm not under the heel of the o...

And the reason for this ignorance is that a knowledge of the role these people played—and play—in American life would reveal more about America to Americans than Americans wish to know. The

And the sea moved her back down the shore.

And the sex, I said. It will be frequent. Possibly violent. You’ll be screaming. Neighbors will make phone calls.

And the stars in the night were the eyes of his wolves, and the wind itself was their song.

And the storm he was deliberately creating raked over the decimated landscape of his soul, obscuring the ragged, desolated mess he was.

And the strange thing was: I knew that most people didn't see her as I did--if anything, found her a bit odd-looking wth her off-kilter walk and her spooky redhead pallor. For whatever dumb reason I h...

And the strangeness of the good news is that, like those in Matthew 25 who sat before the throne and said Huh? When did we ever feed you, Lord?, we never know when we experience Jesus in all of this....

And the sun goes on, day after day, burning and burning. The sun and time. The sun and time and burning. Burning.

And the thing about being in love, Wally said to Angel, is that you can’t force anyone. It’s natural to want someone you love to do what you want, or what you think would be good for them, but you hav...

And the thing about grace, real grace, is that it stings. It stings because if it's real it means we don't deserve it. ... And receiving grace is basically the best shitty feeling in the world.

And the thing about love, Wally said to Angel, is that you can’t force anyone. It’s natural to want someone you love to do what you want, or what you think would be good for them, but you have to let...

And the trick of having faith, he said, was that it was necessary to believe in God without any great or even remotely reassuring evidence that we don’t inhabit a godless universe.

And the true heart of us, our human kind, is that we’re connected, at our best, by purities of love found in no other creature.

And the truth is, I’d felt kind of a thrill about wearing Jason’s Big Boy pants. I was a sick kid, even way back then.

And the truth is, the country is very cool. It’s absolutely the new town.

And the uncles, the aunts, the cousins, the nieces, the nephews, that lived in those walls, the gibbering pack of tree apes that said nothing, nothing, nothing and said it loud, loud, loud.

And the very act of living is a tide; at first it seems to make no difference at all, and then one day you look down and see how much pain has eroded

And the way you find out how much they care is by looking into the eyes—eyes never learn how to lie.

And the world goes on regardless of joy or despair or one woman!s fortune or one man!s loss. And we can!t know our own lives beyond the details we can manage. And the things that change us forever hap...