There's a lot of thievery involved in writing. You're breaking into other people's spaces and other people's stories.

I don't see novels ending with any real sense of closure.

What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power.

What he would say, he cannot say to this woman whose openness is like a wound, whose youth is not mortal yet. He cannot alter what he loves most in her, her lack of compromise, where the romance of the poems she loves still sits with ease in the real world. Outside these qualities he knows there is no order in the world.

All I ever wanted was a world without maps.

Her hand touched me at the wrist. "If I gave you my life, you would drop it. Wouldn't you?" I didn't say anything.

She had grown older. And he loved her more now than he had loved her when he understood her better, when she was the product of her parents. What she was now was what she herself had decided to become.