The regional voice is the universal voice.

Our house is made of glass... and our lives are made of glass; and there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves.

I had forgotten that time wasn't fixed like concrete but in fact was fluid as sand, or water. I had forgotten that even misery can end.

The relationship between parents and children, but especially between mothers and daughters, is tremendously powerful, scarcely to be comprehended in any rational way.

you're an insomniac, you tell yourself: there are profound truths revealed only to the insomniac by night like those phosphorescent minerals veined and glimmering in the dark but coarse and ordinary otherwise; you have to examine such minerals in the absence of light to discover their beauty, you tell yourself.

Though I revise constantly as I write, I will usually revise much of the work again after I've reached the ending.

I could never take the idea of religion very seriously.