In some deep place in her heart, Caroline had kept alive the silly romantic notion that somehow David Henry had once known her as no one else ever co….

They turned a distracted gaze on the world, wide-eyed, somehow, and questioning..

My first job was in a nursing home - a terrible place in retrospect. It was in an old house, and the residents were so lonely. People rarely visited ….

The Lake of Dreams grew gradually, over many years, elements and ideas accruing until they gained enough critical mass to become a novel..

Norah looked at her son’s tiny face, surprised, as always, by his name. he had not grown into it yet, he still wore it like a wrist band, something t….

Your understanding of a place changes the longer you stay; you discover more, and your own life gets woven into the fabric of the community..

...and the distance between them, millimeters only, the space of a breath, opened up and deepened, became a cavern at whose edge he stood..

You can't spend the rest of your life tiptoeing around to try and avert disaster. It won't work. You'll just end up missing the life you have..

She didn't love him and he didn't love her; she was like an addiction, and what they were doing had a darkness to it, a weight..

She had died at age twelve, and by now she was nothing but the memory of love-- nothing, now, but bones..

I love to swim, and I love being near water..

Either things grow and change or they die..

You missed a lot of heartache, sure. But David, you missed a lot of joy..

It seemed there was no end at all to the lies a person could tell, once she got started..

So something had begun, and now she could not stop it. Twin threads ran through her: fear and excitement. She could leave this place today. She could….

Its impossible to control the reception of your work - the only thing you can control is the experience of writing itself, and the work you create..

There was something not quite right about her eagerness, an eerie kind of voyeurism in her need for bad news..

This was her life. Not the life she had once dreamed of, not a life her younger self would ever have imagined or desired, but the life she was living….

That there were other worlds, invisible, unknown, beyond imagination even, was a revelation to him..

He carried Paul inside and up the stairs. He gave him a drink of water and the orange chewable aspirin he like and sat with him on the bed, holding h….

No one could suspect the intricate mysteries of her heart..