“I always tell my students, about the biggest baddest things in life you must try to write small and light, save the big writing for the unexpected tiny thing that always makes or breaks a story.”

“If I die tonight it will be with every single thing unfinished (like, I suppose, any other night), and yet, what a gift to die on the verge of tears. I have spent my life trying to understand the way this rock and this ache go together, why a granite peak is more dramatic half dressed in clouds...,why sunlight under fog is better than the sum of its parts, why my best days and my worst days are always the same days, why (often) leaving seems like the only solution to the predicament of loving (each other) the world.”

“Do you write novels?" I said."Novels, Lord no," she said. "I can't even stay married.”

“I wanted her to see that the only life worth living is a life full of love; that loss is always part of the equation; that love and loss conjoined are the best opportunity we get to live fully, to be our strongest, our most compassionate, our most graceful selves. ”

“There was something about the prairie for me—it wasn’t where I had come from, but when I moved there it just took me in and I knew I couldn’t ever stop living under that big sky. ”

“...the purser has something resembling joy in her voice when she welcomes us to San Francisco. 'I probably don't need to tell you all to open the overhead bins with caution,' she says. 'If your contents haven't shifted, you must be carrying lead weights.”

“His name was Zeke, short for Ezekiel. She asked him if he was religious, he said only about certain things.”