If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart.

This has been her problem all her life: picturing other people's responses. She's too good at it. She can picture the response of anyone--other people's reactions, their emotions, their criticisms, their demands--but somehow they don't reciprocate. Maybe they can't. Maybe they lack the gift, if it is one.

Canada was built on dead beavers.

we lived in the gaps between the stories

Optimism means better than reality; pessimism means worse than reality. I'm a realist.

I was sand, I was snow—written on, rewritten, smoothed over.

If you feel that there's the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can't, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you'd be a very strange person indeed.