...and the distance between them, millimeters only, the space of a breath, opened up and deepened, became a cavern at whose edge he stood.

A moment was not a single moment at all, but rather an infinite number of different moments, depending on who was seeing things and how.

He wished he had some kind of X-ray vision for the human heart.

After Memory Keepers Daughter, it took me a few months to shut out the world. I really had to turn off the Internet and sort of cloister myself away from the world again and sink into that psychic space to write again.

My first job was in a nursing home - a terrible place in retrospect. It was in an old house, and the residents were so lonely. People rarely visited them. I only stayed there a couple of months, but it made a strong impression on me.

In some deep place in her heart, Caroline had kept alive the silly romantic notion that somehow David Henry had once known her as no one else ever could. But it was not true. He had never even glimpsed her.

Away from the bright motion of the party, she carried her sadness like a dark stone clenched in her palm.