I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.

The place of stillness that you have to go to to write, but also to read seriously, is the point where you can actually make responsible decisions, where you can actually engage productively with an otherwise scary and unmanageable world.

Family's the one thing you can't change. You can cover yourself with tattoos. You can get a grapefruit-sized ring going through your earlobe. You can change your name. You can move to a different continent. But you cannot change who your parents were, and who your siblings are, and who your children are.

It seems to me self-evident that if you have a life, things happen in it, and certain things do change; certain things end. People you know die.

It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.

But she was seventeen now and not actually dumb. She knew that you could love somebody more than anything and still not love the person all that much, if you were busy with other things.

Elective ignorance was a great survival skill, perhaps the greatest.