Herman slipped his hand into mine, and I thought, 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, and the next thing that happened was we kissed each other, and I found I knew how, and I felt happy and sad in equal parts, because I knew that I was falling in love, but it wasn't with him.

In nature forms are endlessly being destroyed and then recreated and destroyed and recreated. Nature isn't afraid to destroy forms in the process of regenerating. So why are we afraid of that in life?

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

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

Better to try and fail than not to try at all

Sometimes I thought about nothing and sometimes I thought about my life. At least I made a living. What kind of living? A living. It wasn't easy. I found out how little is unbearable.

I'm very interested in structure, how multiple stories are assembled in different ways; that is what memory does as well.