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 ….

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 ….

A successful song comes to sing itself inside the listener. It is cellular and seismic, a wave coalescing in the mind and in the flesh. There is a me….

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

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

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

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

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