Trees are as close to immortality as the rest of us ever come.

In everyone's life there are people who stay and people who go and people who are taken against their will.

You've done so many things and read so many books. Do you still believe in happy endings?" "Oh my Lord, yes." Bernadette's hands were pressed against each other like a book, like a prayer. "I guess I would. I've had about a hundred of them.

A man says something. Sometimes it turns out to be the truth, but this has nothing to do with the man who says it.

Every mother can easily imagine losing a child. Motherhood is always half loss anyway. The three-year-old is lost at five, the five-year-old at nine. We consort with ghosts, even as we sit and eat with, scold and kiss, their current corporeal forms. We speak to people who have vanished and, when they answer us, they do the same. Naturally, the information in these speeches is garbled in the translation.

I once broke up with a boy because he wrote me an awful poem.

Where you succeed will never matter so much as where you fail.