He could not wait to get rid of them so he could enjoy remembering them.

nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be.

I meet a person, and in my mind I'm saying three minutes; I give you three minutes to show me the spark.

The worst of it is over now, and I can't say that I am glad. Lose that sense of loss--you have gone and lost something else.

Maybe this is not a come-down-from-the-ledge story. But I tell it with the thought that the woman on the ledge will ask herself a question, the question that occurred to that man in Bogota. He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn't good?

Sometimes I can better describe a person by another person's reaction. In a story in my first book, I couldn't think of a way to sufficiently describe the charisma of a certain boy, so the narrator says, "I knew girls who saved his gum."

A five-hour flight works out to three days and nights on land, by rail, from sea to shining sea. You can chalk off the hours on the back of the seat ahead. But seventy-some hours will not seem so long to you if you tell yourself first: This is where I am going to be for the rest of my natural life.