Had they known at these moments to be quietly joyful? Most likely not. People mostly did not know enough when they were living life that they were living it.

I actually see myself in all my characters. In order to imagine what it feels like to be another person I have to use my own experiences and responses to the world.

I love theater. I love sitting in an audience and having the actors right there, playing out what it means to be a human being.

The appetites of the body were private battles.

But after a certain point in a marriage, you stopped having a certain kind of fight, Olive thought, because when the years behind you were more than the years in front of you, things were different.

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.

He wanted to put his arms around her, but she had a darkness that seemed to stand beside her like an acquaintance that would not go away.