But after a certain point in a marriage, you stopped having a certain kind of fight, Olive thought, because when the years behind you were more than the years in front of you, things were different.

I suspect the most we can hope for, and it's no small hope, is that we never give up, that we never stop giving ourselves permission to try to love and receive love.

Traits don't change, states of mind do.

I actually see myself in all my characters. In order to imagine what it feels like to be another person I have to use my own experiences and responses to the world.

The facts didn't matter. Their stories mattered, and each of their stories belonged to each of them alone.

Had they known at these moments to be quietly joyful? Most likely not. People mostly did not know enough when they were living life that they were living it.

You surely know that in the course of a long marriage it is not unusual for a husband or a wife to develop a crush on someone else.

I'm so interested in the fact that we really don't know anybody. We think we know the people close to us, but we don't, we really don't.

In a way, I'm very interested in writing about Maine, because I think Maine represents its own kind of history. It's the oldest state, and it's the whitest state.

People like to think the younger generation's job is to steer the world to hell. But it's never true, is it? They're hopeful and good - and that's how it should be.

Or maybe, he thought, returning to the boxes, it was part of being Catholic--you were made to feel guilty about everything

Florence imagined the Hammer and Sickle metallurgical plant to be an enormous brick factory like the ones in New York. But as she approached she saw it was in fact a small city of its own

We are all fools in love

Everybody wants their own little place in the world. And maybe mine is here… Loving you from a distance…

We are responsible. There is nothing being done to us apart from what we are doing to ourselves.

Ever since I was a child I have had this instinctive urge for expansion and growth.

I suspect that I am the result of particularly weak conception on the part of my father. His sperm was probably emitted in a rather offhand manner.

Throughout history, ideas need patrons.

...I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow, even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!

Sometimes I have no idea whats going on

That's always good when you can bring out two sets of fans and supporters and then kinda cross them in between.