To really be centered and to really work well and to think about the kinds of things that I need to think about, I need to spend large amounts of time alone.

I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.

Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.

You are - all your experience just kind of accumulates, and the novel takes a richness of its own simply because it has the weight of all those years that one's put into it.

Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.

Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only—if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn’t it? And isn’t the whole point of things—beautiful things—that they connect you to some larger beauty?

The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.