Both my mother and I have close groups of friends that include other writers, and these friendships are very important to us.

Part of the beauty of love was that you didn’t need to explain it to anyone else. You could refuse to explain. With love, apparently you didn’t necessarily feel the need to explain anything at all.

Just the act of sleeping beside someone you liked to be with. Maybe that was love.

Books light the fire-whether it's a book that's already written, or an empty journal that needs to be filled in.

But now the world, he thought, had taken them. He knew that this could suddenly happen. One day you just woke up, and there was somewhere that you needed to be.

The child who was happy with herself meant the parents had won the jackpot.

Being an adult child was an awkward, inevitable position. You went about your business in the world: tooling around, giving orders, being taken seriously, but there were still these two people lurking somewhere who in a split second could reduce you to nothing. In their presence, you were a big-headed baby again, crawling instead of walking.