“I’d have given any- thing to know how Mom and Dad were, but you can’t ask your parents such questions. You have to wait for them to tell you what it is that will happen next...”

“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.”

“You obsess (but of course you obsess) until the joy is gone from that thing you'd loved, until your fury overwhelms your passion, until you no longer know how to sit with your back against a tree and write poetry that no one will ever see.”

“When I was a boy, that was all I wanted—to grow a pair of wings and get up into the sky. I had a basement full of failed wing projects. Boards and capes and motors, even a pile of found feathers I once tried to glue together with a bottle of Elmer’s; you should have seen your grandmother’s face. But I never got any higher than the backyard fence I’d launch from. I never got inside a cloud. Your raven did.”

“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.”

“You know how a river goes on and on? That's my love for you.”

“How do you know when an apology is true—when it means something, or can change something, or will last outside the moment?”