Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It's the thing that lets us say goodbye.

And in some of the houses, people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered. What really mattered in life, what gave it weight, was death.

The worst thing about religion was religious people.

My change from girl to boy was far less dramatic than the distance anybody travels from infancy to adulthood.

The world, a tired performer, offers us another half-assed season.

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

She wanted out of the decorating scheme.