The way love feels is always only approximate. I would like to be without shame. I would like to be shameless. I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was.

My brother and I were both teenage writers, and he was, I have to say, better than I was, but he went into science, and I went into writing.

When I was young I believed that "nonfiction" meant "true." But you read a history written in, say, 1920 and a history of the same events written in 1995 and they're very different. There may not be one Truth - there may be several truths - but saying that is not to say that reality doesn't exist.

It wasn't so easy though, ending the war. A war is a huge fire; the ashes from it drift far, and settle slowly.

Maybe sadness was a kind of hunger, she thought. Maybe the two went together.

Science never makes things that do not have to do with what we feel, by which I mean what we want and what we fear.

They will not let you have peace, they don't want you to have anything they don't have themselves.