Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.

I write to make sense of my life." -John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey

I was here on earth because I chose to be.

Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.

Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.

She cried for herself, she cried because she was afraid that she herself might die in the night, because she was alone in the world, because her desperate and empty life was not an overture but an ending, and through it all she could see was the rough, brutal shape of a coffin.

How can a people who do not mean to understand death hope to understand love, and who will sound the alarm?