To hold happiness is to hold the understanding that the world passes away from us, that the petals fall and the beloved dies. No amount of mockery, no amount of fashionable scowling will keep any of us from knowing and savoring the pleasure of the sun on our faces or save us from the adult understanding that it cannot last forever.

My writing process, such as it is, consists of a lot of noodling, procrastinating, dawdling, and avoiding.

There is no such thing as a good writer and a bad liar.

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 do not say what I feel, and people often take that for shyness, even kindness.

Some people are your family no matter when you find them, and some people are not, even if you are laid, still wet and crumpled, in their arms.

Boundaries are the lines we draw that mark off our autonomy and that of other people, that protect our privacy and that of others. Boundaries allow for intimate connection without dissolving or losing one's sense of self.