We face up to awful things because we can't go around them, or forget them. The sooner you get it over with, the sooner you say 'Yes, it happened, and there's nothing I can do about it,' the sooner you can get on with your own life. You've got children to bring up. So you've got to get over it. What we have to get over, somehow we do. Even the worst things.

Walking on the land or digging in the fine soil I am intensely aware that time quivers slightly, changes occurring in imperceptible and minute ways, accumulating so subtly that they seem not to exist. Yet the tiny shifts in everything--cell replication, the rain of dust motes, lengthening hair, wind-pushed rocks--press inexorably on and on.

In a rough way the short story writer is to the novelist as a cabinetmaker is to a house carpenter.

Anyway, there's something wrong with everybody and it's up to you to know what you can handle.

I wish I knew how to quit you.

And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.

I think it's important to leave spaces in a story for readers to fill in from their own experience.