I was also ready to believe, though, that whatever good things I had managed to set upright could topple at any second.

I always try to stay as quiet as possible about a book until it's finished.

There are times in your life when, despite the steel weight of your memories and the sadness that seems to lie at your feet like a shadow, you suddenly and strangely feel perfectly okay.

Sometimes they rose up inside her, these moments of fierce happiness, kindling out of their own substance like a spark igniting a mound of grass. It was a joy to be alive, a strange and savage joy, and she stood there in the warmth and destruction of it knowing it could not last.

There was no one alive who did not contribute his share of mystery to the world.

You could not presume that people were healthy. You could not presume that they would welcome the little nudges and jostlings of life. You had to behave as though everyone you met was walking a thin wire far above the earth, where the slightest wind might rock them off their balance and send them tumbling to the ground.

I'm uncommonly slow to show my work to other people, and by the time I do I've usually exhausted myself so completely that all I really want is for someone to tell me that my efforts have added up to something - not one of my better qualities, I admit.