But that inadequacy, or feeling of inadequacy, never really goes away. You just have to trudge ahead in the rain, regardless.

Your numbness is something perhaps you cannot help. It is what the world has done to you. But your coldness. That is what you do to the world.

This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic.

For love to last, you had to have illusions or have no illusions at all. But you had to stick to one or the other. It was the switching back and forth that endangered things.

Usually she ordered a cup of coffee and a cup of tea, as well as a brownie, propping up her sadness with chocolate and caffeine so that it became an anxiety.

A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.

One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them.

They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.

The only really good piece of advice I have for my students is, 'Write something you'd never show your mother or father. And you know what they say? I could never do that!'

She was unequal to anyone's wistfulness. She had made too little of her life. Its loneliness shamed her like a crime.

If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.

True hope has no room for delusion.

No need for Jesus and the Lord Buddha to fight

It is better to trust and lose occasionally than always be suspicious and lose every time.

A clean pond is more useful than a dirty ocean.

Crazy. It was the same word María and Tía Rosa flung at Grandpa Lázaro. The same word anyone said when they didn't understand something. "Crazy" was a way to shut people up, disregard them entirely.

Beware, O earth, the prophet who claims to know the time but never wears a watch.

Lindy Hoppers never die - they just swing out.

I realized that public affairs were also my affairs.

You look at a guy who's being brave. He's afraid, or he wouldn't be brave. If he isn't afraid, he's stupid.

You don't go to the people that are just like you. You go to the people that you have to earn their credit.