(Such a life)engaged gross quantities of hope and despair and set them wildly side by side, like a Third World country of the heart.

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 know in my heart that man is good, that what is right will always eventually triumph, and there is purpose and worth to each and every life.

Personally, I believe in tools that close the gap between professionals and beginners, understanding that — push comes to shove — this is a world of beginners.

Nothing activates adrenaline production like pain. - Dr. Sienna Brooks

Tolerance is the virtue of those who don't believe anything.

The professional's grasp of the numbers is a measure of the control he has over the events that the figures represent.

I have never yet happened upon a trace of evidence... to show that any one animal was ever made for another as much as it was made for itself.

Illness sets the stage for the opening of our hearts.

That is perhaps what we seek throughout life, that and nothing more, the greatest possible sorrow so as to become fully ourselves before dying.

My definition of poetry (if I were forced to give one) would be this: words that have become deeds.

Any child can be developed, it depends on how you do it