We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.

She had always been a reader… but now she was obsessed. Since her discovery of the book hoard downstairs from her job, she’d been caught up in one such collection of people and their doings after the next…The pleasure of this sort of life – bookish, she supposed it might be called, a reading life – had made her isolation into a rich and even subversive thing. She inhabited one consoling or horrifying persona after another…That she was childless and husbandless and poor meant less once she picked up a book. Her mistakes disappeared into it. She lived with an invented force.

I always have some way of putting the stories together that works for the book. I've always switched points of view in my books. I'm a Gemini.

There will never come a time when I will be able to resist my emotions.

Women are strong, strong, terribly strong. We don't know how strong until we're pushing out our babies.

Columbus only discovered that he was in some new place. He didn't discover America.

When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.