It's tremendously hard work. Yes, I love arranging the words and having them fall on the ear the right way and you know you're not quite there and you're redoing it and redoing it and there's a wonderful thrill to it. But it is hard.

I'm so interested in the fact that we really don't know anybody. We think we know the people close to us, but we don't, we really don't.

I suspect the most we can hope for, and it's no small hope, is that we never give up, that we never stop giving ourselves permission to try to love and receive love.

I do reread, kind of obsessively, partly for the surprise of how the same book reads at a different point in life, and partly to have the sense of returning to an old friend.

All these lives," she said. "All the stories we never know." (125)

And it was too late. No one wants to believe something is too late, but it is always becoming too late, and then it is.

The facts didn't matter. Their stories mattered, and each of their stories belonged to each of them alone.