I missed him. Love, I realized, was something your spine memorized. There was nothing you could do about that.

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.

A dangerous and treacherous path is only worth it when the desire to have courage outweighs the driving need to get to the other side.

We wanted a labour force, but human beings came.

I'm sick of girls who don't know how to high-five.

Danger arouses interest. Where death is involved, the vilest criminal invariably stirs a little compassion.

If Fang is in any way harmed while I'm gone-if he gets a hangnail-you won't see another morning. Are we clear on that?

The process of creation becomes necessary to the painter perhaps more than is the picture. The process in fact is habit-forming

God never fits His word to suit me; He fits me to suit His word.

All this time, I wasn't hungry for success, I was hungry.

Pleasure disappoints; possibility never.

We have only one consciousness stream. When we associate with Truth, we ascend upwards, and when we associate with untruth we fall down.