The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.

There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross.

There always should be something hanging unfinished before a scene ends so that there's a reason for going to the next scene.

Half a page--and the morning is already ancient.

The rulers of the country generally believed that betting eliminates strikes. Men had to work in order to gamble.

…Even the idea of a city never entered his mind. It was as if he had walked under the millimeter of haze just above the inked fibers of a map, that pure zone between land and chart, between distances and legends, between nature and storyteller. The place they had chosen to come to, to be their best selves, to be unconscious of ancestry. Here, apart from the sun compass and the odometer mileage, and the book, he was alone, his own invention. He knew during these times how the mirage worked, the fata morgana, for he was within it.

Once I've discovered the story, I might restructure it, maybe move things around, set up a clue that something is going to happen later, but that happens much later in an editorial capacity.