Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.

Solitude is a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot, a tug of impalpable thread on the web pulling mate to mate and predator to prey, a beginning or an end. Every choice is a world made new for the chosen.

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

A miscarriage is a natural and common event. All told, probably more women have lost a child from this world than haven't. Most don't mention it, and they go on from day to day as if it hadn't happened, so people imagine a woman in this situation never really knew or loved what she had. But ask her sometime: how old would your child be now? And she'll know.

Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.

I'm not pretending to be ingenuous; I know what I'm doing.

A person could spend most of a lifetime in retrospective terror, thinking of all the things one nearly didn't do.