It’s like the grief has been covered over with some kind of blanket. It’s still there, but the sharpest edges are .. muffled, sort of. Then, ever now and then, I lift the corner of the blanket just to check, and .. whoa! Like a knife! I’m not sure that will ever change.

I mean you're given all these lessons for the unimportant things--piano-playing, typing. You're given years and years of lessons in how to balance equations, which Lord knows you will never have to do in normal life. But how about parenthood? Or marriage, either, come to think of it. Before you can drive a car you need a state-approved course of instruction, but driving a car is nothing, nothing, compared to living day in and day out with a husband and raising up a new human being.

The one ironclad rule is that I have to try. I have to walk into my writing room and pick up my pen every weekday morning

I hated childhood, and spent it sitting behind a book waiting for adulthood to arrive.

I write because I want more than one life; I insist on a wider selection. It's greed, plain and simple.

For my own family, I would always choose the makeshift, surrogate family formed by various characters unrelated by blood.

How plotless real life was!