I had always been the kind of boy who was quick to laugh and quick to cry..

She had the same responsibility as everybody else did: to live as softly as she could in the world..

Anyone who has ever experienced love knows that you can have too much or too little. You can have love that parches, love that defeats. You can have ….

There are times in your life when, despite the steel weight of your memories and the sadness that seems to lie at your feet like a shadow, you sudden….

With every sentence she writes, Davis freshens the senses. Her novels achieve a tone that’s unlike anyone else’s, creating an atmosphere you don’t so….

...When you die, the energy that kept you alive filters into the people you loved. Did you know that? It's like a fire you've tended all your life, a….

I suppose that when you're growing up, you're bound to reach an age when you feel buffeted by all the changes in your life, when either your mind beg….

The books you love best - those are the immensity of the sea..

I always try to stay as quiet as possible about a book until it's finished..

If your reading life and your friendships overlap, that's just a nice coincidence - a case where the conversation you're having with books and the co….

Sometimes you imagine that everything could have been different for you, that if only you had gone right one day when you chose to go left, you would….

Sometimes they rose up inside her, these moments of fierce happiness, kindling out of their own substance like a spark igniting a mound of grass. It ….

Worry is a mean-faced dwarf who beats on your heart like a kettledrum..

I was also ready to believe, though, that whatever good things I had managed to set upright could topple at any second..

What I wanted was to write a memoir that was immersive rather than reflective, to resurrect a long-gone version of my own consciousness. I kept expec….

The living carry us inside them like pearls. We survive only so long as they remember us..

I write out of gratitude for all the books I have loved over the years..

I don't think our lives actually unfold with morals attached to them, or meanings that are easily extracted, or jokes designed to generate sympathy. ….

How often, you wonder, has the direction of your life been shaped by such misunderstandings? How many opportunities have you been denied--or, for tha….

You remember having friends who used to lampoon the world so effortlessly, crouching at the verge of every joke and waiting to pounce on it, and you ….

Who was it who said that every virtue contains its corresponding vice? C.S. Lewis? Virginia Woolf? You forget. But it has always worried you that wha….