My mother and I were like two continents moving slowly but inexorably apart; my father, the bridge builder, constantly extending the fragile edifice he had constructed to connect us.

I know there are people who don't read fiction at all, and I find it hard to understand how they can bear to be inside the same head all the time.

Sometimes you can know things. Things about yourself. Things from before you can remember.

Our lives are so important to us that we tend to think the story of them begins with our birth. First there was nothing, then I was born...Yet that is not so. Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Families are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole. - Vida Winter

One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else.

Do they sense it, these dead writers, when their books are read? Does a pinprick of light appear in their darkness? Is their soul stirred by the feather touch of another mind reading theirs? I do hope so.

A story so cherished it has to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic.