The writing I tend to think of as 'good' is good because it's mysterious.

Light is good company, when alone; I took my comfort where I found it, and the warmest yellow bulb in the living-room lamp had become a kind of radiant babysitter all its own.

It is all about numbers. It is all about sequence. It's the mathematical logic of being alive. If everything kept to its normal progression, we would live with the sadness-cry and then walk-but what really breaks us cleanest are the losses that happen out of order.

My eyelids are my own private cave, he murmured. That I can go to anytime I want.

I don't think so, I don't agree. The most unbearable thing I think by far, she said, is hope.

We hit the sidewalk, and dropped hands. How I wished, right then, that the whole world was a street.

But I loved George in part because he believed me; because if I stood in a cold, plain room and yelled FIRE, he would walk over and ask me why.