It's the city's crush and heave that move you; its intricacy; its endless life. You know the story about Manhattan as a wilderness purchased for strings of beads, but you find it impossible not to believe that it has always been a city; that if you dug beneath it you would find the ruins of another, older city, and then another and another.

I seem to produce a novel approximately once every three years.

I suspect any serious reader has a first great book, just the way anybody has a first kiss.

Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation resembles no book I've read before. If I tell you that it's funny, and moving, and true; that it's as compact and mysterious as a neutron; that it tells a profound story of love and parenthood while invoking (among others) Keats, Kafka, Einstein, Russian cosmonauts, and advice for the housewife of 1896, will you please simply believe me, and read it?

Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.

People are more than you think they are. And they're less, as well. The trick lies in negotiating your way between the two.

a certain bohemian, good-witch sort of charm