“Letting go is easy: it's all downhill.”

“Let go. Feel the weight all around you, feel the squeezing of your lungs, the slow, low pressure. Let yourself go deeper. There is nothing but bottom. There is nothing but the taste of metal, and the echoes of cold things, and days that look like darkness.”

“. . . Liesl & Po is the embodiment of what writing has always been for me at its purest and most basic - not a paycheck, certainly; not an idea, even; and not an escape. Actually, it is the opposite of an escape; it is a way back in, a way to enter and make sense of a world that occasionally seems harsh and terrible and mystifying, And, of course, it is a way of finding a happy ending - even, or especially, when the happy ending is denied me in real life. Let it be an escape for its readers. For me, it is a way of not letting go.”

“If you draw a circle, there will always be an inside and an outside, and unless you're a total nut job, it's pretty easy to see which is which. It just happens.”

“Find the things that matter, and hold on to them, and fight for them, and refuse to let them go.”

“Grief is like sinking, like being buried. I am in water the tawny color of kicked-up dirt. Every breath is full of choking. There is nothing to hold on to, no sides, no way to claw myself up. There is nothing to do but let go.Let go. Feel the weight all around you, feel the squeezing of your lungs, the slow, low pressure. Let yourself go deeper. There is nothing but bottom. There is nothing but the taste of metal, and the echoes of old things, and days that look like darkness.”

“I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it's the effect or vice versa”