Happiness is the lucky pane of glass you carry in your head. It takes all your cunning just to hang on to it, and once it's smashed you have to move into a different sort of life.

A childhood is what anyone wants to remember of it. It leaves behind no fossils, except perhaps in fiction.

He dares not concern himself with the future for fear of disturbing the present.

The scolding voice is her own, so abrasive and quick, yet so powerless to move her.

Eventually, everything gets stuck between a pair of parentheses or buried in the bottom of a trunk.

And yet, within her anxiety, secured there like a gemstone, she carries the cool and curious power of occasionally being able to see the world vividly. Clarity bursts upon her a spray of little stars. She understands this, and thinks of it as one of the tricks of consciousness; there is something almost luxurious about it.. The narrative maze opens and permits her to pass through. She may be crowded out of her own life - she knows this for a fact and has always know it - but she possesses, as a compensatory gift, the startling ability to draft alternative versions.

This is why I read novels: so I can escape my own unrelenting monologue.