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.

Time cures you first, and then it kills you.

I'm widest awake as a writer doing something new, engaged in a process I'm not sure I can finish, generating at the edge of my powers. Some people bungee jump; I write.

Morality is not a large, constructed *thing* you have or have not, but simply a capacity. Something you carry with you in your brain and in your hands.

Those first few weeks are an unearthly season. From the outside you remain so ordinary, no one can tell from looking that you have experienced an earthquake of the soul. You've been torn asunder, invested with an ancient, incomprehensible magic. It's the one thing that we never quite get over: that we contain our own future.

The last generation's worst fears became the next one's B-grade entertainment.

I do my best work if I think about what it is I have to offer.