Writing doesn't come real easy to me. I couldn't write a novel in a year. It wouldn't be readable. I don't let an editor even look at it until the second year, because it would just scare them. I just have to trust that all these scraps and dead-ends will find a way.

Needing and getting don’t seem likely to match up any time soon... What needs doing is mine to do.

And then she thought that you went on living one day after another, and in time you were somebody else, your previous self only like a close relative, a sister or brother, with whom you shared a past. But a different person, a separate life. Certainly neither she nor Inman were the people they had been the last time they were together. And she believed maybe she liked them both better now.

He had been alone in the world and empty for so long. But she filled him full, and so he believed everything that had been taken out of him might have been for a purpose. To clear space for something better.

Surely it is a sin to reject the few gifts we are given. Be happy in the flash of time granted to us or hurt forever.

It is a bad idea to live too long. Few carry it off well.

Disease is nature's revenge for our destructiveness.