If you're born lucky, you don't have to be good.

I had wanted to write Ghost Country for a long time, but it wouldn't work.

Nothing kinder than strangers. Nothing stranger than kindness.

Around the time I turned 30, I wanted to publish a novel

People have less privacy and are crammed together in cities, but in the wide open spaces they secretly keep tabs on each other a lot more

When I enter a library, when I enter the world of books, I feel the ghosts of the past on my shoulders urging me to speech. I hear Patrick Henry cry to the Burgsses, 'Is Life so dear, or Peace so sweet, to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?' I hear Sojourner Truth tell me that the hand that rocks the cradle can also rock the boat, and William Lloyd Garrison say, 'I am in earnest, I will not be silenced.'

She knew the intensity of adolescence, and knew no cure for it except growing up. And then one has age and experience, and mourns the loss of intensity. Maybe it's why musicians and mathmaticians are said to peak young-poetry needs the fire of an unbounded universe.