There is really nothing more to say - except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.

How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it.

I don't wait to be struck by lightning and I don't need certain slants of light in order to be able to write.

I don't want you to write about what you know, because you don't know anything. I don't want to hear about your boyfriend or your grandma... I'm getting a little tired of 'my life story as fiction'. Please don't tell me about your little life - is there nothing larger? More important?

Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.

I'm a writer in the world. I translate the confusion that I might feel, the dread that I know I feel, moving towards some other place, moving away from puny language, from all that dread into some other kind of language.

All she saw, down in the cellar well beneath the stoop, was a light yellow feather with a tip of green. And she had never named him. Had called him "my parrot" all these years. "My parrot." "Love you. "Love you." Did the dogs get him? Or did he get the message - that she said, "My parrot" and he said, "Love you," and she had never said it back or even taken the trouble to name him - and manage somehow to fly away on wings that had not soared for six years.