Listen. Slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward. You are afraid you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember.

Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.

she's never forgotten, either, how a mystery caught in the hand could lose its grace

Hallie and I... were all there was. The image in the mirror that proves you are still here. We had exactly one sister apiece. We grew up knowing the simple arithmetic of scarcity: A sister is more precious than an eye.

It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn't.

I thought: this is how life is, ridiculous beyond comprehension.

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.