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

“Who hasn't walked through a life of small tragedies?”

“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?”

“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...”

“Writing is a struggle against silence.”

“Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed; an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is woven.”

“People who think that grammar is just a collection of rules and restrictions are wrong. If you get to like it, grammar reveals the hidden meaning of history, hides disorder and abandonment, links t...”