“I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms for example...”

“Claire believed she was teetering literally on the edge of sanity. A strong wind was all it would take to blow her one way or the other. Iowa had its share of storms, strong winds and tornadoes, they were all unpredictable. It made an ironic parallel for her life.”

“The wind and the sea and the storm were his domain and I wanted nothing to do with them any longer. I just wanted Cain.”

“If I were to choose between the power of writing a poem and the ecstasy of a poem unwritten, I would choose the ecstasy. It is better poetry.”

“You kids are handling this a whole lot better than he is.’I wondered if that meant we were pretty darned tough.Or whether we simply lacked the imagination to see how bad things really were”

“I never used to write down all the ideas that occur to me while writing. I believed if I forgot them they were not important, and the ones that really mattered were those I remembered. Now I write them all down.”