“The moth settled onto the curtain and sat still. It was an astonishing creature, with black and white wings patterned in geometric shapes, scarlet underwings, and a fat white body with black spots running down it like a snowman’s coal buttons.”

We’re surrounded by mandates, and I believe that literature should be mandate-free. I feel very strongly about that.

Does a man become a revolutionary out of the belief he’s entitled to joy rather than submission?

I did it to win love, and to prove myself capable. Not to move mountains. In my opinions, mountains don’t move. They only look changed when you look down on them from great height.

I know I’m a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science.

Now I’m starting to think he wasn’t supposed to be my whole life, he was just this doorway to me.

I live in a rural part of Virginia surrounded by farms and farmers.

Households that have lost the soul of cooking from their routines may not know what they are missing: the song of a stir-fry sizzle, the small talk of clinking measuring spoons, the yeasty scent of rising dough, the painting of flavors onto a pizza before it slides into the oven.

Parenting is something that happens mostly while you’re thinking of something else.

The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don’t know.

Back then I was still appalled that God would set down his barefoot boy and girl dollies into an Eden where, presumably, He had just turned loose elephantiasis and microes that eat the human cornea. Now I understand, God is not just rooting fo the dollies.

As long as I kept moving, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer’s long hair in water. I knew the weight was there but it didn’t touch me. Only when I stopped did the slick, dark stuff of it come floating around my face, catching my arms and throat till I began to drown. So I just didn’t stop.

The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.

If you’re standing in the manure pile, it’s somebody’s job to mention the stink.

All of the promises of politicians, generals, madmen, and crusaders that war can create peace have yet to be borne out.

Every time I step onto an airplane, I turn to the right and take a good, hard stare into the maw of the engine. I don’t know what I’m looking for. I just do it.

No human eye had looked at this moth before; no one would see its friends. So much detail goes unnoticed in the world.