A Prayer for Owen Meany: A Novel

Surely you know how much this community respects you, John," the canon told me. "But don't you see how your . . . opinions can be disturbing? It's very American-to have opinions as ... strong as your opinions. It's very Canadian to distrust strong opinions."

Your memory is a monster; you forget—it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with a will of its own.

It's a no-win argument-that business of what we're born with and what our environment does to us. And it's a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth.

in New Hampshire-we tend to think that if you don't know where you're going, you don't belong where you are.