Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.

Because you can get free of everything except the space where things have been

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

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

...we take comfort in the symmetries we find in life because they suggest a design where there is none.

Why does one begin to write? Because she feels misunderstood, I guess. Because it never comes out clearly enough when she tries to speak. Because she wants to rephrase the world, to take it in and give it back again differently, so that everything is used and nothing is lost. Because it's something to do to pass the time until she is old enough to experience the things she writes about.

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.