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

You can’t change the tale so that you turned left one day instead of right, or didn’t make the mistake that might have saved your life a day later. We don’t get those choices. The story is what got you here, and embracing its truth is what makes the outcome bearable.

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 only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course.

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

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

It's taken years for me to understand that dying doesn't end the story; it transforms it. Edits, rewrites, the blur, aand epiphany of one-way dialogue. Most of us wander in and out of one another's lives until not death, but distance, does us part-- time and space and heart's weariness are the blander executioners or human connection.