I think the job of writing and literature is to encourage each one of us to believe that we're living in a story.

Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth.

Poetry [is] more necessary than ever as a fire to light our tongues.

This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.

I love the solitude of reading. I love the deep dive into someone else's story, the delicious ache of a last page.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous, or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular, but because it never forgot what it could do.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.