I Wrote To Explain My Own Life

One Does Not Know Where Love Will Take You.

My Attraction To Story Is A Ceaseless Current That Runs Through The Center Of Me. My Inexhaustible Ardor For Reading Seems Connected To My Hunger For Storylines That Show Up In Both Books And In The Great Tumbling Chaos Of Life.

...when The Words Pour Out Of You Just Right, You Understand That These Sentences Are All Part Of A River Flowing Out Of Your Own Distant, Hidden Ranges, And All Words Become The Dissolving Snow That Feeds Your Mountain Streams Forever. The Language Locks Itself In The Icy Slopes Of Our Own High Passes, And It Is Up To Us, The Writers, To Melt The Glaciers Within Us. When These Glaciers Break Off, We Get To Call Them Novels, The Changelings Of Our Burning Spirits, Our Life's Work.

If Smallness Was Fortune, Then I Had Come Across A Treasure, Infinitesimal And Beyond Value. I Felt Lucky. You Had To Decide What Was Estimable And Precious In Your Life And Set Out To Find It. The Objects You Valued Defined You.

Her Library Would Have Been Valuable To A Bibliophile Except She Treated Her Books Execrably. I Would Rarely Open A Volume That She Had Not Desecrated By Underlining Her Favorite Sections With A Ball-point Pen. Once I Had Told Her That I Would Rather See A Museum Bombed Than A Book Underlined, But She Dismissed My Argument As Mere Sentimentality. She Marked Her Books So That Stunning Images And Ideas Would Not Be Lost To Her.