Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it -- namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.

Although I write in English, and despite the fact that I__ from America, I consider myself an Armenian writer. The words I use are in English, the surroundings I write about are American, but the soul, which makes me write, is Armenian. This means I am an Armenian writer and deeply love the honor of being a part of the family of Armenian wrtiters.

A tontine is a kind of primitive insurance fund, combined with a sort of lottery. And while it has many flaws as a financial scheme, as a literary device_

American corporate capitalism is a murder-suicide mission.

Country music is the poetry of the American spirit.

I used to walk out, at night, to the breakwater which divides the end of the harbor form the broad moor of the salt marsh. There was nothing to block the wind that had picked up speed and vigor from its Atlantic crossing. I__ study the stars in their brilliant blazing, the diaphanous swath of the milk Way, the distant glow of Boston backlighting the clouds on the horizon as if they__ been drawn there in smudgy charcoal. I felt, perhaps for the first time, particularly American, embedded in American history, here at the nation__ slender tip. Here our westering impulse, having flooded the continent and turned back, finds itself face to face with the originating Atlantic, November__ chill, salt expanses, what Hart Crane called the __nfettered leewardings,_ here at the end of the world.