I am not a saint or a cripple, I am not a wound; now I will see whether I am a coward..

This has been her problem all her life: picturing other people's responses. She's too good at it. She can picture the response of anyone--other peopl….

I hate to break this to you: One of these days I'm going to die. I expect that when I croak I'll no longer be using Twitter, unless I can do it from ….

We shouldn't be saying 'Save the planet'; we should be saying: 'Save viable conditions in which people can live.' That's what we're dealing with here..

Why can't I believe? she asked the darkness. Behind her eyelids she saw an animal. It was golden colour, with gentle green eyes and canine teeth, and….

You can mean more than one. You can mean thousands. I'm not in any immediate danger, I'll say to you. I'll pretend you can hear me. But it's no good,….

Because you are never here but always there, I forget not you but what you look like You drift down the street in the rain, your face dissolving, cha….

The body is so easily damaged, so easily disposed of, water and chemicals is all it is, hardly more to it than a jellyfish drying on sand..

There are some virtues to not saying what you think all the time..

We pulled the seeds out and scattered them on their flossy parachutes, leaving only the leathery brownish yellow tongue, soft as the inside of an elb….

The one good thing to be said about announcing yourself as a writer in the colonial Canadian fifties is that nobody told me I couldn't do it because ….

Some cleric putting a match to her. /Neither of them looks happy about it. /Once lit, she'll burn like a book, /like a book that was ever finished, /….

I could see how you could do extreme things for the person you loved. Adam One said that when you loved a person, that love might not always get retu….

Literature is not only a mirror; it is a map, a geography of the mind..

For the children with their greedy little mouths represent the future, which like time itself will devour all now alive..

If you're not annoying somebody, you're not really alive..

Stick a shovel into the ground almost anywhere and some horrible thing or other will come to light. Good for trade, we thrive on bones; without them ….

Where do you draw the line, between love and greed? We never did know, we always wanted more. We want to take it all in, for one last time, we want t….

What we share may be a lot like a traffic accident but we get one another. We are survivors of each other. We have been shark to one another, but als….

Axiom: you are a sea. Your eye- lids curve over chaos My hands where they touch you, create small inhabited islands soon you will be all earth: a kno….

Victorian literature was my subject at Harvard..