“...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.”

“what if you could have all the wisdom of a lifetime and still look like you looked when you were twenty-five''or what?' I say.'what, what' she says.I say, 'I thought we were playing Would You Rather...?'She twists her head like a dog at a foghorn. 'Marla,' I say, 'you get the wisdom because you don't anymore look like you did when you were twenty-five.'She says, 'You don't understand the rules to this game.”

“When he says "Skins or blankets?" it will take you a moment to realized that he's asking which you want to sleep under. And in your hesitation he'll decide that he wants to see your skin wrapped in the big black moose hide. He carried it, he'll say, soaking wet and heavier than a dead man, across the tundra for two—was it hours or days or weeks? But the payoff, now, will be to see it fall across one of your white breasts. It's December, and your skin is never really warm, so you will pull the bulk of it around you and pose for him, pose for his camera, without having to narrate this moose's death.”

“Life gives us what we need when we need it; receiving what it gives us is a whole other thing.”

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

“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.”

“Find yourself a place in the universe,' she said, 'a place where the dirt feels like goodness under your feet. Take the right picture and a man will walk into it. If you can bear him even a little, then for a while let him stay.”