When you write, you take the ball and you hold it up to the light and you turn it slowly, and let people draw their own conclusions. And try to bring empathy to all sides of the equation.

I like to break left when people think I'm going to go right.

So perhaps the greatest worry of all was that one day you would realize that all the worries of your life amounted to one thing: the desire to just stop worrying.

This ravishing world. This achingly bittersweet, ravishing world.

The military was all about hierarchies, who urinated highest on the hydrant

Writers who pretend that everything they're doing is completely new are full of it.

A thousand recollected lives were passing through her, a thousand stories - of love and work, of parents and children, of duty and joy and grief. Beds slept in and meals eaten, and the bliss and pain of the body, and a view of summer leaves from a window on a morning it had rained; the nights of loneliness and the nights of love, the soul in it's body keeping always longing to be known.