You live your life at the time you live it -- you don't have much of an overview when what's happening to you is still happening.

I try to see the whole woman,' Eddie said to Hannah. 'Of course I recognize that she's old, but there are photographs - or the equivalent of photographs in one's imagination of anyone's life. A whole life, I mean. I can picture her when she was much younger than I am - because there are always gestures and expressions that are ingrained, ageless. An old woman doesn't see herself as an old woman, and neither do I. I try to see her her whole life in her. There's something so moving about someone's whole life.

When I was still in prep school - 14, 15 - I started keeping notebooks, journals. I started writing, almost like landscape drawing or life drawing. I never kept a diary, I never wrote about my day and what happened to me, but I described things.

What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.

He was one of those people things came easily to, but he did little to demonstrate that he deserved to be gifted.

The powerful wind swept his hair away from his face; he leaned his chest into the wind, as if he stood on the deck of a ship heading into the wind, slicing through the waves of an ocean he’d not yet seen.

It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Before you can write anything, you have to notice something.