Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.

To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole.

The storytelling gift is innate: one has it or one doesn't. But style is at least partly a learned thing: one refines it by looking and listening and reading and practice - by work.

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

Death is the mother of beauty,” said Henry. “And what is beauty?” “Terror.

But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.

It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.