We knew that Cecilia had killed herself because she was a misfit, because the beyond called to her, and we knew that her sisters, once abandoned, felt her calling from that place, too.

and she had succeeded, on the second try, in hurling herself out of the world

If you talk to geneticists they are constantly finding that your genes are being switched on and off because of the environment. Genes alone do not determine an exact path in your life.

The television replaced the sound of conversation that was missing from my grandparents' lives.

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

I hadn't gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there it's only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you're time traveling. In this life we grow backwards.

I remember liking to write stories pretty early on. In fourth or fifth grade, they would give us the beginning of a story, and we were supposed to finish it. I remember liking that. But I didn't think about deciding to become a writer until high school at about the age of 16.