...She felt that nothing could kill her hope now, nothing. She was seventy-five and she was going to make some changes in her life.

Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.

Then she waited, with parted lips and a saucy challenge in her eyes, to see how her presence -- the drama of being her -- was registering. In the way of such chicks, she seemed convinced of the originality of her provocation.

He and his wife loved each other and brought each other daily pain. Everything else he was doing in his life, even his longing for Lalitha, amounted to little more than flight from circumstance. He and Patty couldn't live together and couldn't imagine living apart. Each time he thought they'd reached the unbearable breaking point, it turned out that there was still further they could go without breaking.

Use well thy freedom.

Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance

The Mekons were kind of like the background music of my life.