An average of seventy-four species become extinct every day, which was one good reason but not the only one to hold someone's hand.

I am always coming up with architectural metaphors when I think about writing. But I think one of the things that draw us to literature is that it gives us this very attractive illusion that there is meaning in the world - things connect.

Only later did I come to understand that to be a mother is to be an illusion. No matter how vigilant, in the end a mother can't protect her child - not from pain, or horror, or the nightmare of violence, from sealed trains moving rapidly in the wrong direction, the depravity of strangers, trapdoors, abysses, fires, cars in the rain, from chance.

He wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard [...]. How could he have forgotten what he had always known: there is no match for the silence of God.

And if the man who once upon a time had been a boy who promised he'd never fall in love with another girl as long as he lived kept his promise, it wasn't because he was stubborn or even loyal. He couldn't help it.

The moment had passed, the door between the lives we could have led and the lives we led had shut in our faces.

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.