“Write the book you want to read, the one you cannot find.”

“Open a book this minute and start reading. Don’t move until you’ve reached page fifty. Until you’ve buried your thoughts in print. Cover yourself with words. Wash yourself away. Dissolve.”

“There are chapters in every life which are seldom read, and certainly not aloud.”

“This is why I read novels: so I can escape my own unrelenting monologue.”

“Happiness is the lucky pane of glass you carry in your head. It takes all your cunning just to hang on to it, and once it's smashed you have to move into a different sort of life.”

“Dreaming her way backward in time, resurrecting images, the young girl realized, with wonder, that the absent are always present, that you don't make them go away simply because you get on a train and head off in a particular direction.”

“A childhood is what anyone wants to remember of it.  It leaves behind no fossils, except perhaps in fiction.”