The Other Americans

Perhaps memory is not merely the preservation of a moment in the mind, but the process of repeatedly returning to it, carefully breaking it up in parts and assembling them again until we can make sense of what we remember.

My mother had to leave many traditions behind and the more time passed, the more they mattered to her.

The present could never be untethered from the past, you couldn't understand one without the other.

Growing up in this town, I had long ago learned that the savagery of a man named Mohammed was rarely questioned, but his humanity always had to be proven.

love was not a tame or passive creature, but a rebellious beast, messy and unpredictable, capacious and forgiving, and that it would deliver me from grief and carry me out of the darkness.

There was a mathematical elegance to faith like this: believe in God, follow His rules, and you will be rewarded; disbelieve, disobey, and you will be punished.

For me, that was the hardest thing about living in America, being so far away, it was like being orphaned.

my heart was aching from hearing my daughters fight,

All I ever wanted was to keep my family together.

but pain is a private business,

How hard the believers make it to get into heaven, I thought, when they have all this right here.

Before Night Comes. Some people think of it as a modern classic. He also wrote We Ourselves, about Northern Ireland.