The lives great artists live and the books they write are two very different things.

I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.

We always worry about the wrong things, don't we?

a certain bohemian, good-witch sort of charm

I feel like there's something terrible and wonderful and amazing that's just beyond my grasp. I have dreams about it. I do dream, by the way. It hovers over me at odd moments. And then it's gone. I feel like I'm always on the brink of something that never arrives. I want to either have it or be free of it.

There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined.

That summer when she was eighteen, it seemed anything could happen, anything at all.