...the long train ride was like traveling through limbo. You weren't anywhere when you were on a train, she decided. You weren't where you had been, and you weren't yet where you were going. You were nowhere. It might be beautiful outside the window-and it was, she had sense enough to realize that-but it wasn't anywhere to her, just a scene passing by that was framed by the train window. (p160)

The thing I have learned through the years is that one idea 'doth' not a novel make. A novel must be several seemingly unrelated ideas that somehow magically come together to create the fabric of the story.

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.

It wasn't so much that he minded telling Leslie that he was afraid to go; it was that he minded being afraid. It was as though he had been made with a great piece missing - one of May Belle's puzzles with this huge gap where somebody's eye should have been. Lord, it would be better to be born without an arm than to go through life with no guts.

I was behaving, just like I promised, but fate intervened.

This is what art is all about. It is weaving fabric from the feathers you have plucked from your own breast. But no one must ever see the process - only the finished bolt of goods. They must never suspect that that crimson thread running through the pattern is blood.

What I have come to believe is that joy is the twin sister of gratitude. I am most joyful when I am most grateful.