I have made the best and happiest ending that I can in this world, made it out of the flax and netting and leftover trim of someone else's life, I know, but made it to keep the innocent safe and the guilty punished, and I have made it as the world should be and not as I have found it.

I am interested in the gaps between one piece of sidewalk and the next. I am interested in the things for which we dont always have a name, and the things that are not easy to articulate - the difference between what we think and how we feel.

Be real and be unashamed, even of your faults. I do truly know what my husband is made of and vice versa.

they danced as though they'd been waiting all their lives for each song.

You cannot fake effort; talent is great, but perseverance is necessary.

It takes something to get married: nerve, hope, a strong desire to make a certain statement - and it takes something to stay married: more hope, determination, a sense of humor, and needs that are best met by being in a pair.

Sophisticated readers understand that writers work out their anger, their conflicts, their endless grief and rolling list of loss, through their stories. That however mean-spirited or diabolical, it's only a story. That the darkness in the soul is shaped into type and lies there, brooding and inert, black on the page, and active, dangerous, only in the reader's mind. Actually, harmless. I am not harmless.