“The purpose of a story is to be an axe that breaks up the ice within us.”

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”

“This is the first thing I have understood:Time is the echo of an axe within a wood.”

“Part of him wanted to weep... but his purpose was rigid within him. He felt he could not bend to gentleness without breaking.”

“In the middle of the night I am awakened by a sound. I sit up abruptly in bed. I hear it again. It's music. Wait, it sounds like the ice cream man, in our house. Is this some kind of twisted nightmare? The flipping ice cream man, breaking in to chop us all up in our beds to the tune of 'Zippity Do Dah'?... My heart slows. I remember. There is no psycho ice cream man here. It is just our new musical soap dispenser...”

“Foreign novels are less action-oriented. They have a different pace; they’re more reflective. They challenge us to look for the story, find the story within the story.”