We all stood and gathered our backpacks and I looked at the floor around my chair to make sure I hadn’t dropped anything. I was terrified of unwittingly leaving behind a scrap of paper on which were written all my private desires and humiliations. The fact that no such scrap of paper existed, that I did not even keep a diary or write letters except bland, earnest, falsely cheerful ones to my family (We lost to St. Francis in soccer, but I think we’ll win our game this Saturday; we are working on self-portraits in art class, and the hardest part for me is the nose) never decreased my fear.

I think I would have liked to have been a twin... Sometimes my sisters and I get mistaken for twins, and I always take it as a compliment.

Perhaps fiction has, for me, served a similar purpose--what is a narrative arc if not the imposition of order on disparate events?--and perhaps it is my avid reading that has been my faith all along.

I guess in life I find people who, at first glance, appear to be very typical or average, whatever that means, and then turn out to have hidden qualities.

I actually liked the disolation of winter; it was the season when it was okay to be unhappy. If I were to ever kill myself, I thought it would be in the summer.

I think in general, novels by men tend to be taken more seriously than novels by women.

I think that there's some confusion in my own mind about what I believe.