There's a general impulse to distract the grieving person - as if you could.

Becoming a parent is actually terrifying. A lot of people have that feeling about their dogs. And if you're the kind of person who's going to have that feeling about a dog you're definitely going to have that about a child.

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.

That no one dies of migraine seems, to someone deep into an attack, an ambiguous blessing.

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.

I wanted to be an oceanographer, actually. It's a way of going underwater. I've always been interested in how deep it was, you know.

The past could be jettisoned . . . but seeds got carried.