Holding hands, for example, is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together.

At the end, all that's left of you are your possessions. Perhaps that's why I've never been able to throw anything away. Perhaps that's why I hoarded the world: with the hope that when I died, the sum total of my things would suggest a life larger than the one I lived.

Part of the work of writing a novel is to uncover the symmetries or connections that make it whole, which might not reveal itself at first.

I won't waste your time with the injuries of my childhood, with my loneliness, or the fear and sadness of the years I spent inside my parents' marriage, under the reign of my father's rage, afer all, who isn't a survivor from the wreck of childhood?

I know there is a moral to this story, but I don't know what it is.

...larger than life...I've never understood that expression. What's larger than life?

The price we paid for the volumes of ourselves that we suffocated in the dark.