One of life's great truths is this: when one is about to be struck by a speeding six-hundred pound Coke machine, one need worry about little else.

A marriage was like a house under constant construction, each year seeing the completion of new rooms. A first-year marriage was a cottage; one that had gone on for twenty-seven years was a huge and rambling mansion. There were bound to be crannies and storage spaces, most of them dusty and abandoned, some containing a few unpleasant relics you would just as soon you hadn't found. But that was no biggie. You either threw those relics out or took them to Goodwill.

When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.

This inhuman place makes human monsters.

She nods. You're good for the ones you love. You want to be good for the ones you love, because you know that your time with them will end up being too short, no matter how long it is.

Sometimes the only thing to do is to take the thing that you must have. Even if someone gets hurt.

Talent is a dull knife that will cut nothing unless it is wielded with great force.