If I had grown up in that house I couldn't have loved it more, couldn't have been more familiar with the creak of the swing, or the pattern of the clematis vines on the trellis, or the velvety swell of land as it faded to gray on the horizon . . . . The very colors of the place had seeped into my blood.

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

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

Still when I lost her, I lost sight of any landmark that might have led me someplace happier, to some more populated or congenial life.

There's nothing like having a sympathetic reader who asks the right questions, who understands what you're trying to achieve and only wants to make it better.

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

Shakespearean words, foreign words, slang and dialect and made-up phrases from kids on the street corner: English has room for them all. And writers - not just literary writers, but popular writers as well - breathe air into English and keep it lively by making it their own, not by adhering to some style manual that gets handed out to college Freshmen in a composition class.