No one would have known, from how he held my hand, [that] over the years of heartache he had hatched a plot to change my life forever. He held his grip and would not let me go. I do not know what joins the parts of an atom, but it seems what binds one human to another is pain.

Despite all their fears, we ask very little of the ones who never loved us. We do not ask for sympathy or pain or compassion. We simply want to know why.

For me, the historical and genealogical library is the one I use. I'm working on, I'll say, it's a time travel novel. I haven't written very much of it. That's the dirty secret of the Cullman center: The writers don't write their fiction there, they just do their research.

How remarkable we are in our ability to hide things from ourselves - our conscious minds only a small portion of our actual minds, jellyfish floating on a vast dark sea of knowing and deciding.

I love going to writers' colonies in pastoral settings where there's nothing to do, but either walk around or read a book or work on your book.

It takes too much imagination to see the sorrows of people we take for happy. Their real battles take place, like those of the stars, in some realm of light imperceptible to the human eye. It is a feat of the mind to guess another's heart.

When I meet a woman whose energy falters at the first barrier,she seems to fade beside my mother.