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.

If your reading life and your friendships overlap, that's just a nice coincidence - a case where the conversation you're having with books and the conversation you're having with actual human beings happen to dovetail.

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

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

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.

With every sentence she writes, Davis freshens the senses. Her novels achieve a tone that’s unlike anyone else’s, creating an atmosphere you don’t so much interpret as breathe.

It's like you're born with all these blessings, only you don't realize they're blessings until you lose them. And if you're thick-headed enough, like me, you don't even realize you've lost them, not until they come back to you.