My grandmother told me once that when you lose somebody you think you've lost the whole world as well, but that's not the way things turn out in the end. Eventually, you pick yourself up and look out the window, and once you do you see everything that was there before the world ended is out there still. There are the same apple trees and the same songbirds, and over our heads, the very same sky that shines like heaven, so far above us we can never hope to reach such heights.

He started to look at me in a manner I recognized: it was the way I looked at a new book, one I had never read before, one that surprised me with all it had to say.

What else is there to write about than love and loss?

Being an outsider is the one thing we all have in common.

You have to choose the voice you are going to trust. You can't listen to everyone.

I don't think I make much of a distinction between the 'real' and the 'fantastic.' They both seem to be threads in the same cloth as far as I'm concerned.

That was the way love was, invisible, there whether or not you wanted to see it or admit to it.