It was possible to feel superior to other people and feel like a misfit at the same time.

Grief is natural,' she said. 'Overcoming it is a matter of choice.

Novelists are always resisting autobiographical readings of their work, because they know how false those can be.

What lingered after them was not life, which always overcomes natural death, but the most trivial list of mundane facts: a clock ticking on a wall, a room dim at noon, and the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself.

The only way we know it's true is that we both dreamed it. That's what reality is. It's a dream everyone has together.

Chunks of his life fell away, so that while we were moving ahead in time, he was moving back.

I was beginning to understand something about normality. Normality wasn't normal. It couldn't be. If normality were normal, everybody could leave it alone. They could sit back and let normality manifest itself. But people-and especially doctors- had doubts about normality. They weren't sure normality was up the job. And so they felt inclined to give it a boost.