Stories are the best democracy we have. We are allowed to become the other we never dreamed we could be.

Part of the beauty of fiction is that we come alive in a body that we don't own.

Ultimately, you can only ever write what you know. It's logically and philosophically impossible to write what you don't know.

Everything was fabulous, even our breakdowns.

She likes the people with the endurance to tolerate the drudge, the ones who know that pain is a requirement, not a curse.

The tunnels of our lives connect, coming to daylight at the oddest moments, and then plunge us into the dark again. We return to the lives of those who have gone before us, a perplexing möbius strip until we come home, eventually, to ourselves.

The person we know at first, she thinks, is not the one we know at last.