Being the first born gives you great patience.

The only way to know where you are is by where you have just been.

Your job is to preserve yourself, not to descend into their hole. It's a relief when you arrive at this place, the point of absurdity, because then you are free, you owe them nothing.

She had always assumed that she would have years to sort out the meaning of life... As she bent over the child she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled.

In writing, as in medicine, there are no short cuts. You need stamina.

There is that lovely feeling of one reader telling another, 'You must read this.' I've always wanted to write a book like that, with the sense that you are contributing to the discourse in middle America, a discourse that begins at a book club in a living room, but then spreads. That is meaningful to me.

We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We'll leave much unfinished for the next generation.