Perhaps we had at last reached that stage of intimacy that destroys intimacy.

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.

I’m his puppet and he is my invisible master, holding my strings from miles away.

Even the most powerful enemies who threaten or oppress God’s children will one day fall.

Worry is spiritual short sight. Its cure is intelligent faith.

I think people are universal.

The sugary taste of satisfaction is bliss.

Tom Brady rises up to the occasion and plays well. That is just who he is.

Both could feel the relationship crumbling to pieces beneath the weight of everything that Gavin refused to say.

You win some, you lose some, and you keep it to yourself.

Sometimes the greatest victories we can make for mankind are the victories we make over ourselves.

Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written.