Salt is added to dried rose petals with the perfume and spices, when we store them away in covered jars, the summers of our past.

I am impressed by how much of my grandparent's life depended on continuities, contacts, connections, friendships, and blood relationships.

We write to make sense of it all.

The life we all live is amateurish and accidental; it begins in accident and proceeds by trial and error toward dubious ends.

If you're going to get old, you might as well get as old as you can get.

You achieve stature only by being good enough to deserve it, by forcing even the contemptuous and indifferent to pay attention, and to acknowledge that human relations and human emotions are of inexhaustible interest wherever they occur.

It is almost impossible to write fiction about the Mormons, for the reason that Mormon institutions and Mormon society are so peculiar that they call for constant explanation.