The baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of a story – of course that is how we all live, it’s the narrative of our lives, but adoption drops you into the story after it has started. It’s like reading a book with the first few pages missing. It’s like arriving after curtain up. The feeling that something is missing never, ever leaves you – and it can’t, and it shouldn’t, because something is missing.

Intensity is the desire to receive. Open yourself to light and you will become light.

I had huge ambition for literature. I don't see the point of doing anything if you don't have ambition for it.

I felt like a thief with a bagful of stolen glances.

We are lucky, even the worst of us, for daylight comes.

Happy ending are only a pause. There are three kinds of big endings: Revenge. Tragedy. Forgiveness. Revenge and Tragedy often happen together. Forgiveness redeems the past. Forgiveness unblocks the future.

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.