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

Dreaming was easier than screaming, and screaming was easier than worrying, and worrying was easier than crying, which was what she knew she would be reduced to if she didn’t keep a hard eye on herself.

Anyone who has ever experienced love knows that you can have too much or too little. You can have love that parches, love that defeats. You can have love measured out in the wrong proportions. It's like your sunlight and water - the wrong kind of love is just as likely to stifle hope as it is to nourish it.

Who was it who said that every virtue contains its corresponding vice? C.S. Lewis? Virginia Woolf? You forget. But it has always worried you that what the virtue of wit contained was the vice of scorn.

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.

The living carry us inside them like pearls. We survive only so long as they remember us.

She had the same responsibility as everybody else did: to live as softly as she could in the world.