I believed that if I was to call myself a writer, I should live on writing. If I could not live on it, even simply, I should destroy every scrap, every trace, every notebook and live some other way.

[My father] had spent his own short time like a priest in charge of a relic, forever expecting the blessed blood to liquefy.

She and Marie were Montreal girls, not trained to accompany heroes, or to hold out for dreams, but just to be patient.

... appeals to memory were never perfectly answered.

Success can only be measured in terms of distance traveled.

Against the sustained tick of a watch, fiction takes the measure of a life, a season, a look exchanged, the turning point, desire as brief as a dream, the grief and terror that after childhood we cease to express.

I began to ration my writing, for fear I would dream through life as my father had done. I was afraid I had inherited a poisoned gene from him, a vocation without a gift.