All really great artists, Jackson Pollack, John Cage, Beckett or Joyce - you are never indifferent to them.

I wanted to touch him, to tell him that even if everyone left everyone, I would never leave him, he talked and talked, his words fell through him, trying to find the floor to his sadness.

Every widow wakes one morning, perhaps after years of pure and unwavering grieving, to realize she slept a good night's sleep, and will be able to eat breakfast, and doesn't hear her husband's ghost all the time, but only some of the time. Her grief is replaced with a useful sadness. Every parent who loses a child finds a way to laugh again. The timbre begins to fade. The edge dulls. The hurt lessens. Every love is carved from loss. Mine was. Yours is. Your great-great-great-grandchildren's will be. But we learn to live in that love.

I got incredibly heavy boots about how relatively insignificant life is, and how, compared to the universe and compared to time, it didn’t even matter if I existed at all.

It’s much easier to be cruel than one might think.

As a writer, putting words on the page is how I pay attention.

My impression is that staying together as a couple does not correspond to the challenges themselves, but whether the very idea of breaking up is an option on the table. If it is, then some people take it. If it's not, then they will keep working at it. You must know people who were terribly suited who make it work. And there are couples who seem perfectly suited that break up. It's a mystery to everyone.