You like to write. It's the single most important quality for someone who wants to be a writer. But not in itself enough.

The years nineteen and twenty are a crucial stage in the maturation of character, and if you allow yourself to become warped when you're that age, it will cause you pain when you're older.

We were, the two of us, still fragmentary beings, just beginning to sense the presence of an unexpected, to be-aquired reality that would fill us and make us whole.

We're all kind of weird and twisted and drowning.

It's a quiet place, so people talk quietly," said Naoko. She made a neat pile of fish bones at the edge of her plate and dabbed at her mouth with a handkerchief. "There's no need to raise your voice here. You don't have to convince anybody of anything, and you don't have to attract anyone's attention.

Sometimes we don't need words. Rather, it's words that need us.

What a terrible thing it is to wound someone you really care for and to do it so unconsciously.