“This is the Delta, where you can look and look but find no visible demarcation line between the salt waters and the fresh waters.”

“There is a feeling like the liquid at the top of an overfilled glass, taut and quivering. I think of that feeling as my feeling, my go-to.”

“Upon learning that Louisa May Alcott spent more than a decade moonlighting as a sordid, heady mix of Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Brontë, I dove eagerly into this secret canon.”

“That’s how I lived through--no--I survived that harsh winter in solitary confinement. It gave me the mental strength to push forward through any situation I faced in the future.”

“I realize that my experiences of Gaelic are like the view from the door of my basement apartment: a sliver of sky and the row houses across the street. I can never see the whole world that way. Yet Gaelic gives me many glimpses into worlds just beyond.”

“So, I fashion from her missteps a different kind of compass, revealing where a teller of stories should tread compassionately, inquisitively, conscientiously—or not at all.”