One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them.

(Such a life)engaged gross quantities of hope and despair and set them wildly side by side, like a Third World country of the heart.

I always had the sense with her that she didn't suffer fools gladly but that life was taking great pains to show her how.

I want to pretend there's such a thing as requited love. As the endurance of love.

One should never turn one's back on a vivid imagination.

If prose can cast a spell, we will listen to it no matter what it's saying. If a narrative uses language in a magical and enlivening way, we will listen to the story. But if the language doesn't cast a spell, we will listen to it only if it is telling us something that actually happened.

Basically, I realized I was living in that awful stage of life between twenty-six to and thirty-seven known as stupidity. It's when you don't know anything, not even as much as you did when you were younger, and you don't even have a philosophy about all the things you don't know, the way you did when you were twenty or would again when you were thirty-eight.