I had to grow up and learn to listen for the unspoken as well as the spoken-and to know a truth.

Laurel could not see her face but only the back of her neck, the most vulnerable part of anybody, and she thought: Is there any sleeping person you can be entirely sure you have not misjudged?

A story is not the same thing when it ends as it was when it began.

To open up the new, to look back on the old may bring forth like discoveries in the practice of art.

What we know about writing the novel is the novel.

A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.

But how much better, in any case, to wonder than not to wonder, to dance with astonishment and go spinning in praise, than not to know enough to dance or praise at all; to be blessed with more imagination than you might know at the given moment what to do with than to be cursed with too little to give you -- and other people -- any trouble.