Nothing I read about grief seemed to exactly express the craziness of it; which was the interesting aspect of it to me - how really tenuous our sanity is.

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it

Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?

California: The west coast of Iowa.

I myself have always found that if I examine something, it's less scary. I grew up in the West, and we always had this theory that if you saw - if you kept the snake in your eye line, the snake wasn't going to bite you. And that's kind of the way I feel about confronting pain. I want to know where it is.

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.

We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.