I thought clay must feel happy in the good potter's hand.

The pearls weren't really white, they were a warm oyster beige, with little knots in between so if they broke, you only lost one. I wished my life could be like that, knotted up so that even if something broke, the whole thing wouldn't come apart.

We don't have a unitary society anymore, you know; it's very fragmented. I look up and down my block in Silverlake and there is a different universe in every house.

Her hatred glittered irresistibly. I could see it, the jewel, it was sapphire, it was the cold lakes of Norway.

I imagined my soul taking in these words like silicated water in the Petrified Forest, turning my wood to patterned agate. I liked it when my mother shaped me this way. I thought clay must feel happy in the good potter's hand.

Being in the library is so addictive for me that I really have to exercise self-control so I can get some writing done at home.

In a train...smash. In his arm her last...breath.' He had loved her. But he hated himself more. Such suffering, so much pain. And he thought it made him hateful. As if suffering was shameful, disgusting, as if pain were a crime. Who can judge another man's suffering?