Research can be a big clunker. It's difficult to know how you can make the historical light.

There was a time when mapmakers named the places they travelled through with the names of lovers rather than their own.

This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world.

You think that you are an iconoclast, but you’re not. You just move, or replace what you cannot have. If you fail at something, you retreat into something else. Nothing changes you.... I left you because I knew I could never change you. You would stand in the room so still sometimes, as if the greatest betrayal of yourself would be to reveal one more inch of your character.

A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands knowing it is something more than water. There is a plant whose heart, if one cuts it out is replaced with fluid containing herbal goodness. Every morning one can drink the liquid amount of the missing heart.

Over the years, confusing fragments, lost corners of stories, have a clearer meaning when seen in a new light, a different place.

When I read biographies, I skip the first thirty pages about the childhood because it doesn't seem interesting to me.