“I have thought for a long time that the way my clothes hang on me is more important than me inside them.”

“Then I saw her smile so close to my eye that there was nothing to see but the smile and the thought came into my head that I’d never been inside a smile before. Who’d have thought being inside a smile would be so ancient and so modern both at once”

“The proper word for me," Robin Goodman says, "is me.”

“There are things that can't be said, because it's hard to have to know them.”

“All short stories long.”

“What would happen if you did just shut a door and stop speaking? Hour after hour after hour of no words. Would you speak to yourself? Would words just stop being useful? Would you lose language altogether? Or would words mean more, would they start to mean in every direction, all somersault and assault, like a thuggery of fireworks? Would they proliferate, like untended plantlife? Would the inside of your head overgrow with every word that has ever come into it, every word that has ever silently taken seed or fallen dormant? Would your own silence make other things noisier? Would all the things you’d ever forgotten, all layered there inside you, come bouldering up and avalanche you?”

“I fall in love. More figuratively speaking, I am walking along the road one day when out of nowhere I am struck by lightning.”