We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.

Write as if you are dying.

It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.

The body of literature, with its limits and edges, exists outside some people and inside others. Only after the writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature.

Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation's short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.

Nothing on earth is more gladdening than knowing we must roll up our sleeves and move back the boundaries of the humanly possible once more.

She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.