Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.

All human life has its seasons and cycles, and no one's personal chaos can be permanent. Winter, after all, gives way to spring and summer, though sometimes when branches stay dark and the earth cracks with ice, one thinks they will never come, that spring, and that summer, but they do, and always.

Life is difficult enough without Meryl Streep movies.

Just remember: If one bird carried every grain of sand, grain by grain, across the ocean, by the time he got them all on the other side, that would only be the beginning of eternity.

I loved her enough to forget myself, my self pitying despairs, and be content that something she thought happy was going to happen.

You can't blame a writer for what the characters say.

A disquieting loneliness came into my life, but it induced no hunger for friends of longer acquaintance: they seemed now like a salt-free, sugarless diet.