We imagine things — that we wouldn't be able to survive, but in fact, we do survive. ... We have no choice, so we do it.

Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.

[O]ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.

California: The west coast of Iowa.

Marriage is memory, marriage is time. Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time.

Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.

My first notebook was a Big Five tablet, given to me [at age five] by my mother with the sensible suggestion that I stop whining and learn to amuse myself by writing down my thoughts.