Rituals are comforting; rituals combat loneliness.

To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread. We were just a family. In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense.

He had in abundance youth’s most dangerous qualities: optimism and relentlessness. He would risk everything he had to fly the plane that could carry the bomb within him.

…there was no more safety to be found in love than there was to be found in a virus.

A novel is a piece of architecture. It's not random wallowings or confessional diaries. It's a building-it has to have walls and floors and the bathrooms have to work.

There is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old.

Just when you begin thinking of yourself as memorable, you run into someone who can't even remember having met you