When the word 'nostalgia' was coined in the 18th century, it was used to describe a pathology - not so much a sense of lost time, but a severe homesickness.

To touch and feel each thing in the world, to know it by sight and by name, and then to know it with your eyes closed so that when something is gone, it can be recognized by the shape of its absence. So that you can continue to possess the lost, because absence is the only constant thing. Because you can get free of everything except the space where things have been.

Sometimes no length of string is long enough to say the thing that needs to be said. In such cases all the string can do, in whatever its form, is conduct a person's silence.

You're looking for ways always as the writer to bring readers into intimacy, you with them with you. Photos can sometimes do the opposite, create distance and perspective, but these somehow didn't. They somehow bring the reader closer.

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

...The plural of elf is elves! What a language! What a world!

At first Babel longed for the use of just two words: Yes and No. But he knew that just to utter a single word would be to destroy the delicate fluency of silence.