When you are writing fiction your task is to reflect the fullest complications of the world

Discovering, for example, that as witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been. [p. 65]

May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby.

All bad things are exaggerated in the middle of the night. When you lie awake, you only think of bad things.

Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.

When we fall in love, we hope - both egotistically and altruistically - that we shall be finally, truly seen: judged and approved. Of course, love does not always bring approval: being seen may just as well lead to a thumbs-down and a season in hell.

Grief seems at first to destroy not just all patterns, but also to destroy a belief that a pattern exists.