“I know now that what is tragic isnt the moment. It is the memory.”

“Maybe this is how it happened first for everyone adults promising us their own failed future.”

“I was eleven, the idea of two identical digits in my age still new and spectacular and heartbreaking. The girls must have felt this. They must have known. Where had ten, nine, eight, and seven gone?”

“Creating a novel means moving into the past, the hoped for, the imagined. It is an emotional journey, fraught at times with characters who don't always do or say what a writer wishes.”

“I knew I was lost inside the world, watching it and trying to understand why too often I felt like I was standing just beyond the frameof everything.”

“At the day's end, a writer lives alone with her story, wrestling with characters and settings, and the way light filters into and out of a scene. The deeper messages often escape her.Sometimes I ta...”

“It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.”

“If I am going to be drownedif I am going to be drownedif I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and t...”

“I'm an Earth ecstatic, and my creed is simple: All life is sacred, life loves life, and we are capable of improving our behavior toward one another. As basic as that is, for me it's also tonic and ...”

“How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up. It's sad, really.”

“Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.”

“What a sad story, I thought for so long. Not that I now think it was happy. But I think it is true, and thus the question of whether it is sad or happy has no meaning whatever.”

“Tragedy is like a strong acid - it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth.”

“It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in suchan inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, theirabsolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire l...”

“Receive what cheer you may. The night is long that never finds the day.”