... sometimes I can feel it, the way we are pouring slowly toward a curve and around it through something dark and soft, and we are bound to each other.

Writing or making anything-a poem, a bird feeder, a chocolate cake-has self-respect in it. You're working. You're trying. You're not lying down on the ground, having given up.

I'm not sure that the benefit - as a writer and as a citizen - that I would get from reading at least the front page of the Times every day or every other day would outweigh the depression.

Once you lose someone it is never exactly the same person who comes back.

Seeing yourself as responsible for the quality of your relationship, as a prime mover in your life, I think is a bold, amazing step.

A family is a mystery.

I think that my work is easy to understand because I am not a thinker, I am not a... How can I put it? I write the way I perceive, I guess.