Being a writer means taking the leap from listening to saying 'Listen to me'.

...that in spite of living in a mansion an American is not above wearing a pair of secondhand pants, bought for fifty cents.

She watched his lips forming the words, at the same time she heard them under her skin, under her winter coat, so near and full of warmth that she felt herself go hot.

My parents had an arranged marriage, as did so many other people when I was growing up. My father came and had a life in the United States one way and my mother had a different one, and I was very aware of those things. I continue to wonder about it, and I will continue to write about it.

She supposed that all those years of loving a person who was dishonest had taught her a few things.

They were things for which it was impossible to prepare but which one spent a lifetime looking back at, trying to accept, interpret, comprehend. Things that should never have happened, that seemed out of place and wrong, these were what prevailed, what endured, in the end.

The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace.