My fairy-tale life ended the moment I wanted to apply for a passport.
Intimacy is being seen and known as the person you truly are.
I have made the best and happiest ending that I can in this world, made it out of the flax and netting and leftover trim of someone else's life, I know, but made it to keep the innocent safe and the guilty punished, and I have made it as the world should be and not as I have found it.
I met Jay Jonhson. I won him the way poor people occasionally win the lottery: Shameless perseverance and embarrassingly dumb luck, and every time I see one of those sly, toothless, beaten-down souls on TV holding a winning ticket, I think, Go, team.
I do not say what I feel, and people often take that for shyness, even kindness.
My writing process, such as it is, consists of a lot of noodling, procrastinating, dawdling, and avoiding.
For me, the short story is the depth of a novel, the breadth of a poem, and, as you come to the last few paragraphs, the experience of surprise.
Gun-free zones don't deter criminals-they help them by providing a guarantee that they will not face any armed resistance. But they do deter the law-abiding. A faculty member with a concealed-handgun permit who breaks the campus gun ban would be fired and likely find it impossible to get admitted to another school. Bringing a firearm into a gun-free zone can have serious adverse consequences for law-abiding people. But for someone like the Virginia Tech killer, the threat of expulsion is no deterrent at all.
Nobody really wants to be a stand-up, they want to get on TV.
Make good scouts of yourselves, become good rifle shots so that if it becomes necessary that you defend your families and your country that you can do it.
Can we not do without the society of our gossip a little while, - have our own thoughts to cheer us?