If sense was gunpowder ever one of you men put together wouldn't have enough to load a round of birdshot.

Just pick words and put one of them after the other like a baby learning to walk, like a drunk carefully crossing the street.

Death ... was the only kept promise out of all life's false starts and switchbacks, all there was at the end of the dusty road.

All good resolve is sanded away by the attrition of time and circumstance.

The Bible says the hairs on a man's head are numbered ... But listen, brother, where does that leave the baldheaded man? Is he shut out? Is he not even kept up with? Is he cut loose adrift without his name put down in the great book of records?

The past was bitter and dry and ashes in his mouth, its bone arms clasped him like some old desiccated lover he could not be shut of.

Aspiring writers who want opinions on things send me things. Most of them come out of workshops and those kinds of programs. It’s more professional than the way I started out. But it doesn’t seem as vital.

Words carried weight, some more than others, and it seemed to him that once you'd arranged them into phrases they stayed that way like bricks you'd laid in a wall and went on meaning what they said no matter what happened.

It is the nature of an enigma to remain unsolved.

He began to suspect another, deeper layer of time, a time of stone and cloud and tree to which the time of clocks and calendars was a gross mockery cobbled up by savages.

The cry of flesh calling to flesh must be the strongest thing in the world.

Time seemed wormholed and faulted, honeycombed in mazes that crossed and recrossed.

These hours before first light were merciless. You could not go back to sleep and it was too early to get up and the things you had done or not done lay in your mind immovable as misshapen things you'd erected from stone.

Madness tracked him like a homeless dog, needed only a kind word or gesture to throw its lot with him forever.

Words once sequenced into phrases were never done with but recycled themselves in perpetuity.

I seen a pretty woman in a red dress ... And then I seen her take it off. What else is there?