“Forgiveness, which is the place that every story turns, the chance we give each other.”

“Imagine music gushing down the hollow places in your bones, and making you liquid, and giving you speed. Imagine music turning your body into a song.”

“I hold to fiction as a cure, or partial cure, or cause for hope, or essential distraction from the rain you wake up to, the doubts in your head, the daily desolation that you have not yet said what is most true, you have not yet crafted the story that reveals you. And therefore something waits. Therefore you must wake and you must write and you are not alone.Your fiction is with you.”

“Were there language, I'd be my own lone letter.”

“Step out from behind the words. When you're a writer you can imagine that the words speak for you and are you, but they're not. You are this living breathing bad hair day kind of person.”

“The night before, I'd gone overboard with my Lila poems, and maybe it's true that I was hoping that in them he'd see the genius of me, the beauty of my words in his hands.”

“Here’s another change I’ve noticed: The dark is more than the sun dropping off, more than the moon and the stars. It’s what you can’t see that you hope you will see, what hasn’t been that might be.”