From that point of view, I realized that my hole was not miles deep after all. My father, in fact, could stand on the bottom and it only reached up to his chest. Darkness, you know, is relative.

No matter who you are, there is always some part of you that wishes you were someone else, and when, for a millisecond, you get that wish, it's a miracle.

Polar north can't get away from a magnet; the magnet finds it, no matter what.

When you have been burned by fire once, you don't leap into the flames again.

I think there are readers out there and I don't think the book is dead. And more importantly I don't think readers have to choose between literary and commercial fiction.

she told me she'd be a phoenix." The image of the mythical creature rising from the ashes glitters in my mind. "They don't really exist." "She said that depends on whether or not there's someone who can see them.

eskimos maybe? believed stars were holes in the sky where people who died could peek through at you