Silence has many advantages. When you do not speak, other people presume you to be deaf or feeble-minded and promptly make a show of their own limitations.

I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I'd written.

A woman knows she can walk away from a pot to tend something else and the pot will go on boiling; if she couldn't this world would end at once.

Be still, and the world is bound to turn herself inside out to entertain you. Everywhere you look, joyful noise is clanging to drown out quiet desperation.

I'm never going to tell the reader what to believe; I'm going to examine these characters that believe different ways, and examine their motives.

I considered her my ally, because, like me, she was imperfect.

It occurs to her that there is one thing about people you can never understand well enough: how entirely inside themselves they are.