If writers possess a common temperament, it's that they tend to be shy egomaniacs; publicity is the spotlight they suffer for the recognition they crave.

The real hell of this," he told her, "is that you're going to get through it.

I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures.

The belief that life was hard and often its worst battles were fought in private, that it was possible to walk through fear and come out scorched but still breathing.

My idea of a productive day, as both a child and an adult, was reading for hours and staring out the window.

It's and old, old story: I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that, too.

Hope in the beginning feels like such a violation of the loss, and yet without it we couldn't survive.