...prodigal summer, the season of extravagant procreation. It could wear out everything in its path with its passionate excesses, but nothing alive with wings or a heart or a seed curled into itself in the ground could resist welcoming it back when it came.

I'm of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved.

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.

For if there is any single thing that everyone hopes for most dearly, it must be this: that the youngest outlive the oldest.

There is a strange moment in time, after something horrible happens, when you know it's true, but you haven't told anyone yet.

The death of something living is the price of our own survival, and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep.

Something in me was always watching life from the outside, permanently obsessed with the notion of belonging vs. not-belonging [to a group]. It did not make for a happy childhood, but it was excellent training for a writer.