An agony. The exit like the entrance - but reserved. A palindrome: gut-tug.

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.

The only things we can keep are the things we freely give to God. What we try to keep for ourselves is just what we are sure to lose.

Crying defies scientific explanation. Tears are only meant to lubricate the eyes. There is no real reason for tear glands to overproduce tears at the behest of emotion.

Hope is the light at the end of the tunnel guiding the way.

You should write a book, " Matrick suggested.Kit snorted. "Who wants to read the self-pitying lamentations of an old revenant?""There's your title right there, " said Ganelon.

Bank robbery is an initiative of amateurs. True professionals establish a bank.

New rumors that Saddam Hussein is planning to flee to a castle in Libya with 10 billion dollars. Now President Bush doesn't know whether to nuke him or give him a tax cut.

I think that we all, each one of us, we all have to earn our future.

You speak of Lord Byron and me; there is this great difference between us. He describes what he sees I describe what I imagine. Mine is the hardest task.

Grandfather kicked the stop pedal, and my face gave a high-five to the front window.

For me being the youngest, there was never ever anything that was an issue to cause rivalry between me and my sisters.