She wouldn't climb out of the bed for her sister, but she had climbed into a crater. She wouldn't cross a room, but she had crossed a continent..

War is unnatural, it causes people to act unnaturally..

But there had to be a quota. An upper limit to the number of miracles one is privileged to in a lifetime. How many times can a beloved reappear?.

Invader and invaded held on to their fistfuls of earth, but in the end, the earth outlived the hands that held it..

He was losing her incrementally. It might be a few stray hairs listless on the pillow, or the crescents of bitten fingernails tossed behind the headb….

Anytime I can get either of them really laughing, I immediately pull out a pad of paper write the joke down, regardless of where we are or what we're….

Entire years had passed when he was rich enough in time to disregard the loose change of a minute, but now he obsessed over each one, this minute, th….

She wanted to hold foreign syllables like mints on her tongue until they dissolved into fluency..

Life: a constellation of vital phenomena—organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation..

In my own work, humor is necessary, for the reasons stated above, but also because forbidding your characters silliness, absurdity, irony, and vulgar….

We twist our souls around each other’s miseries..

From personal experience, I completely agree that it is often easier to go for monotone sadness. When I was starting out, I wrote a gazillion short s….

For their entire lives, even before they met you, your mother and father held their love for you inside their hearts like an acorn holds an oak tree..

Perhaps our deepest love is already inscribed within us, so its object doesn't create a new word but instead allows us to read the one written..

You are mine. I recognize you. We twist our souls around each other's miseries. It is that which makes us family..

The short story that eventually grew into Constellation was the first fiction set in Russia that I'd ever written, and that was right around the time….

Her father was the face of her morning and night, he was everything, so saturating Havaa’s world that she could no more describe him than she could t….

Nothing, she now knew, could be defined in exclusion, and every bug, pencil, and grass blade was a dictionary in itself, requiring the definitions of….

Sleep just a while longer, that's it, where else can you go where you neither suffer nor cause suffering..

A good mixtape didn't just gather together a bunch of love songs, but instead created an emotional narrative specific to your affection. The stories ….

Inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce, and that is who we are..