Sixteen years on the streets and you can learn a lot. But all the wrong things, not the things you want to learn. Sixteen years on the streets and you see a lot. But all the wrong sights, not the things you want to see.

Even more than getting married or having kids, I found losing a parent is what thrusts you into adulthood. For me it was. That was when the Earth tilted on its axis, and there was a paradigm shift, and I felt like a different person.

As long as you have a garden you have a future and as long as you have a future you are alive.

I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life, you know, whatever the topic or impulse which comes, I follow it along trustingly. And I don't have any sense of its coming to a kind of crescendo, or of its petering out either. It is just going steadily along.

I once cried because I had no shoes to play soccer, but one day, I met a man who had no feet.

I mean you're given all these lessons for the unimportant things--piano-playing, typing. You're given years and years of lessons in how to balance equations, which Lord knows you will never have to do in normal life. But how about parenthood? Or marriage, either, come to think of it. Before you can drive a car you need a state-approved course of instruction, but driving a car is nothing, nothing, compared to living day in and day out with a husband and raising up a new human being.