I sit there thinking about how much courage it takes to live an ordinary life.

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.

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

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

She was tired of everyone wanting to go to heaven, nobody wanting to die. The only thing worth grieving over, she said, was that sometimes there was more beauty in this life than the world could bear.

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

I think one of the biggest political failures, and the biggest social failures, over the past few years has been the failure of empathy; not being able to look at the other person down the street.