Babies change things, open doors you thought were shut, close others. Make you into something you never been.

It's important to set challenges that you're not sure you're equal to.

I wanted her to to go on talking and understand without me saying anything. I wanted her to love me enough to leave him, to pack us up and take us away from him, to kill him if need be. (107)

People begin to write in order to create what they have not found and, a little bit, to give something back.

The worst thing in the world was the way I felt when I wanted us to be like the families in the books in the library, when I just wanted Daddy Glen to love me like the father in Robinson Crusoe. (209)

When I was growing up, I always read horror books, while my sister read romance novels.

It has seemed to me that literature, as I meant it, was embattled, that it was increasingly difficult to find writing doing what I thought literature should do - which was simply to push people into changing their ideas about the world, and to go further, to encourage us in the work of changing the world, to making it more just and more truly human.