“In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.”

“He had scores to settle with the world, and she, at that moment, was world enough for him.”

“Writing keeps me at my desk, constantly trying to write a perfect sentence. It is a great privilege to make ones living from writing sentences. The sentence is the greatest invention of civilizatio...”

“How flat all sounds are at the seaside, flat and yet emphatic, like the sound of gunshots heard at a distance.”

“Still the dream persists, suppressed but always there, that somehow by some miraculous effort of the heart what was done could be undone. What form would such atonement take that would turn back ti...”

“What I was afraid of was my own grief, the weight of it, the ineluctable corrosive force of it, and the stark awareness I had of being, for the first time in my life, entirely alone, a Crusoe shipw...”

“I had never liked, even feared a little, this wild reach of marsh and mud flats where everything seemed turned away from the land, looking off desperately toward the horizon as if in mute search fo...”

“Id gone from living alone in New York as a lowly shoe clerk to becoming a shieldmaiden with a family to come home to. It didnt get much better than that.”

“I’d gone from living alone in New York as a lowly shoe clerk to becoming a shieldmaiden with a family to come home to. It didn’t get much better than that.”