People have thoughts they’d sooner not have. It happens in life.

For years and years I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel.

Never underestimate the meanness in people's souls... Even when they're being kind... especially when they're being kind.

A story ... has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.

Now i no longer believe that people's secrets are defined and communicable, or their feelings full-blown and easy to recognize.

I loved taking off. In my own house, I seemed to be often looking for a place to hide - sometimes from the children but more often from the jobs to be done and the phone ringing and the sociability of the neighborhood. I wanted to hide so that I could get busy at my real work, which was a sort of wooing of distant parts of myself.

Because if she let go of her grief even for a minute it would only hit her harder when she bumped into it again.