Added to their loveliness was a new mysterious suffering, perfectly silent, visible in the blue puffiness beneath their eyes or the way they would sometimes stop in mid-stride, look down, and shake their heads as though disagreeing with life.

No matter how long your've been at it, you always start from scratch.

It took courage to let things fall apart so beautifully.

The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind.

Is there anything as incredible as the love story of your own parents? Anything as hard to grasp as the fact that those two over-the-hill players, permanently on the disabled list, were once in the starting lineup? It's impossible to imagine my father, who in my experience was aroused mainly by the lowering of interest rates, suffering the acute, adolescent passions of the flesh.

She was a large, disordered woman, like a child's drawing that didn't stay within the lines.

I think the suicides in my first book came from the idea of growing up in Detroit. If you grow up in a city like that you feel everything is perishing, evanescent and going away very quickly.