How incredibly far our lives drift from where we knew with all certainty they would go. How little today resembles what yesterday thought it would look like.

Today we fight. Tomorrow we fight. The day after, we fight. And if this disease plans on whipping us, it better bring a lunch, 'cause it's gonna have a long day doing it.

I've attempted to flood the path with light where I could, and where I could not I've wanted at least to hold up a candle so that others coming this way might not stumble too painfully.

I will bear this grief, I will endure it. I will reach a point where it doesn't kick me down an abyss whenever I turn my back on it.

How can it be that there is such a colossal gap between what we think we know about grief and mourning and what we actually find out when it comes to us?

A kind of Providence keeps us blind to the intensity of suffering so as to keep us sane, until that day when the suffering is our own or that of someone we love beyond imagining.

I know what you're gonna think, what you're gonna ask. Percy Jackson, why are you hanging from a Times Square billboard without your pants on, about to fall to your death?

Generally in New York, people just walk over you with no problem about that. Other countries, people want to resuscitate you, like, after a bit.

All the best songs are, I think, the easiest write because they just come out.

The people around you are you. They share your history. They can even write it with you. And when you lose one, there's no doubt you lose some of yourself, however they're lost.

There is satiety in all things, in sleep, and love-making, in the loveliness of singing and the innocent dance.

How often when we are comfortable, we begin to long for something new!

You can never be more outside of you, than what's in you

A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.

I am nothing that isn't professional.

For children: I'm writing a picture book about the Big Dipper and a novel about a cricket, a firefly and a vole. For grownups: I'm writing poems.