Mind who you love. For that matter, mind how you are loved.

Now is almost always the better choice. You never know about later.

I, too, seem to be a connoisseur of rain, but it does not fill me with joy; it allows me to steep myself in a solitude I nurse like a vice I've refused to vanquish.

Thanks to Granna, Werner and Walter had grown up to be highly functioning, productive citizens - but if you were to ask Walter, Werner had a far easier time of it and lived his life with the sanctified nonchalance of those who will do anything to avoid dissecting their souls.

Of all the virtues, discretion began to seem the most rewarding: it kept people guessing and sometimes, by default, admiring.

Writing fiction is a resolutely solitary pastime, and I love being with people, so the public side of being an author is, to me, the reward for all the private time invested. And I love teaching to a fault; I have a hard time not giving away a lot of my own writing energy to my students.

Here we are - despite the delays, the confusion, and the shadows en route - at last, or for the moment, where we always intended to be.