A description of a sexual act need not be an attempt at realist totality, but rather an opportunity to explore the variation of consciousness that happens in intimacy, a profound interruption of our default state of being corporeally isolated.

The word "spiritual" is an irritant in all this, not quite the right word but not quite the wrong one. We all suspect we need it anyway, though we don't really like the word anymore, if we ever did, and we can't say much more for its derivations—spirituality," "spirit"—as it seems they've all gone brittle from overuse or misuse around us. Can we

… perhaps the thing that religion and art share is that mysterious progression: the emotional and visceral process of one idea breaking down to make way for the entrance of another.

Fiction is a record of what has never happened and yet absolutely happened, and those of us who read it regularly have been changed and challenged and broken down a thousand times over by those nothings, changed by people who never existed doing things that no one quite did, changed by characters that don't entirely exist and the feelings and

The impossible questions are the only questions. The existence of the devil revealed the limits of the God we believed to be limitless, and it was reasonable to wonder why. Children know this and adults pretend we don't remember.

I'm not sure if someone who chooses to suffer or is attached to his pain can ever be soothed away from it, and maybe any effort to comfort such a person is actually an effort to change them and therefore not a comfort at all, but rather a bid to shape them into the person you want them to be. Persuasion or coercion may masquerade as a good

She lost track of herself hours ago, and now she's just out there, saying things.