He looks like the sort of man who can't afford to leave, and doesn't want to stay, and so he is doing both at once.

...it was necessary to love silence, but before you could love silence you had to have noise.

Where happiness was not a possibility, the illusion of it was always more important.

This is not my life. These are not my cobwebs. This is not the darkness I was designed for.

The stars looked like nail heads in the sky--pull a few of them out and the darkness would fall.

I love short stories. They're like small imploding universes. They are very tightly bound and controlled. I'd been wanting to write one for ages but just got tangled up in novels. The novel is the same in the sense that it is also a universe, but it explodes outwards with all that shrapnel going in several different directions. I don't see too much difference in the forms except for the fact that writing short stories is like sprinting rather than long-distance running.

She was forever tilted sideways by the notion that pain was inevitable, chance was cruel, and all human ingenuity should go towards the making of a good cup of tea.