I love the structural part of the writing process.

The girl in the mirror caught my eye briefly...It is an uncanny feeling, that rare occasion when one catches a glimpse of oneself in repose. An unguarded moment, stripped of artifice, when one forgets to fool even oneself.

Wars make history seem deceptively simple. They provide clear turning points, easy distinctions.: before and after, winner and loser, right and wrong. True history, the past, is not like that. It isn't flat or linear. It has no outline. It is slippery, like liquid; infinite and unknowable, like space. And it is changeable: just when you think you see a pattern, perspective shifts, an alternate version is proffered, a long-forgotten memory resurfaces.

Children don’t require of their parents a past and they find something faintly unbelievable, almost embarrassing, in parental claims to a prior existence.

She says there are stories everywhere and that people who wait for the right one to come along before setting pen to paper end up with very empty pages.

The world was an awfully large place and it wasn't easy to find a person who'd gone missing sixty years earlier, even if that person was oneself.

Adults weren’t supposed to understand their children and you were doing something wrong if they did.