If you need somebody to dig up rocks eight hours a day underwater, call me.

Resisting and avoiding pain sucks energy-and time. The more you let yourself feel those minute-and-a-half hells, the quicker you'll start feeling those minute-and-a-half happinesses.

The most reliable path to glory is base brute effort.

There are still things out there in the universe to contemplate and spend our lives chasing.

I've managed to create intimacy with people I know, and people that I don't know. The longer things stay inside of us, the more we think they are black or tainted, but they're really not.

If you want to write in a mature and interesting way, you have to have sympathy for everyone that's involved.

You see things really different when your father is so intimately, so indisputably in charge of your continued existence on the planet.

When I was growing up, there were no cell phones and no roads into the bush, and so if something happened to your plane, that was serious. Nobody was coming to rescue you.

There's a kind of intimacy that happens between a mother and an only child. Which only gets more intimate when it's between a mother and only daughter.

I'm pretty much of the Shakespearean school. Dialogue is character. How we speak is who we are.

My mom was a social worker. I had a pretty good idea of what the authorities can do when a parent's not around.

I wanted to stand on the kind of holy ground that wasn't curated by church professionals, where a burning bush could blaze forth in defiance of safety regulations and outside of regular office hours.

I will never hurt you.

If the breath of life is taken, man turn to dust.

They hurried when they could, and dozed when they had to, hiding in tangles of bloodtwig and heartsease at the edge of the road.

Conviction is a good motive, but a bad judge.

Don't underestimate her ability to talk, it's her superpower.

Selfish people are in a way terribly capable of great loves.

I write 'by the seat of my pants.' I love to do research. I am inspired by contemporary writers and contemporary events. I live in the real world.

The only way to the Place beyond Fear is to do the thing you fear most. This is how to surrender to your best destiny.

The public must and will be served.