Getting a book published made me feel a little bit sad... I felt driven by the need to write a book, rather than the need to write. I needed to figure out what was important to me as a writer.

Don’t you see?” I said. “He could change every detail, but he couldn’t change her.” “But why?” His obtuseness frustrated me. “Because he was in love with her!” I said. “Because, to him, she was the only thing that was real.

...our eyes locked in one of those looks that sometimes happen between strangers, when both wordlessly agree that reality contains sinkholes whose depths neither can ever hope to fathom.

If it weren't for her, there would never have been an empty space, or the need to fill it.

Once upon a time there was a boy who lived in a house across the field from a girl who no longer exists. They made up a thousand games. She was Queen and he was King. In the autumn light, her hair shone like a crown. They collected the world in small handfuls. When the sky grew dark they parted with leaves in their hair.

Later - when things happened that they could never have imagined - she wrote him a letter that said: When will you learn that there isn't a word for everything

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.