“That at the same time of this very intimate act of concentrating so carefully on the details of our mother’s palm and fingertips.”

It was a fleeting statement, one I didn’t think she’d hold on to; after all, she had birthed us alone, diapered and fed us, helped us with homework, kissed and hugged us, poured her love into us.

And the warmth of the music inside her, did she believe, for even one glorious second, that her passion had arrived?

But I loved George in part because he believed me; because if I stood in a cold, plain room and yelled FIRE, he would walk over and ask me why.

To see someone you love, in a bad setting, is one of the great barometers of gratitude.

We’re all getting too smart. Our brains are just getting bigger and bigger, and the world dries up and dies when there’s too much thought and not enough heart.

Mom flipped through the magazines like the pages needed to be slapped.

As a writer you ask yourself to dream while awake.

You can ruin anything if you focus at it.

I peeled the skin off a grape in slippery little triangles, and I understood then that I would be undressing every item of food I could because my clothes would be staying on.

I was right at the edge of their circle, like the tail of a Q…

It seems the best work I do is when I am really allowing the unconscious to rule the page and then later I can go back and hack around and make sense of things.

I knew if I ate anything of hers again, it would lkely tell me the same message: help me,

It seemed to happen in springs, the revealing of things.

I am not happy, help me — like a message in a bottle sent in each meal to the eater, and I got it. I got the message.

Light is good company, when alone; I took my comfort where I found it, and the warmest yellow bulb in the living-room lamp had become a kind of radiant babysitter all its own.

It was like we were exchanging codes, on how to be a father and a daughter, like we’d read about it in a manual, translated from another language, and were doing our best with what we could understand.

I lead no party; I follow no leader. I have given the best part of my life to careful study of Islam, its law and polity, its culture, its history and its literature.

You gotta be really careful what you bite off. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. It’s a dangerous world.

Parents are usually more careful to bestow knowledge on their children rather than virtue, the art of speaking well rather than doing well; but their manners should be of the greatest concern.

I use a lot more chords than most organists and I’m careful to phrase them with the guitar.

The flip side of the coin was that even good programmers and language designers tended to do terrible extensions when they were in the heat of programming, because design is something that is best done slowly and carefully.

But often it’s a mechanical transformation, which isn’t as interesting, and you’ve got to be careful how you go about something like that, I think.

To the point that I have to be careful that they don’t take over.

When I climb a building, I’ve been there already, and carefully planned how to start the climb as well as how to do it.