Death means you are in the third person..

She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape..

The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human..

For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope rea….

Everyone has to scratch on walls somewhere or they go crazy.

We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characte….

How does this happen? To fall in love and be disassembled..

The trouble with all of us is we are where we shouldn't be..

All I ever wanted was a world without maps..

A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands, knowing it is something that feeds him more than water..

We are expanded by tears, we are told, not reduced by them..

I see the poem or the novel ending with an open door..

For the first forty days a child is given dreams of previous lives. Journeys, winding paths, a hundred small lessons and then the past is erased..

It doubles your perception, to write from the point of view of someone you're not..

That's one of the great sadnesses of any life - knowing what you know now and then remembering what you did not know then..

There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cr….

Love is the use one makes of another..

There is a story, always ahead of you. Barely existing. Only gradually do you attach yourself to it and feed it. You discover the carapace that will ….

The joyful will stoop with sorrow, and when you have gone to the earth I will let my hair grow long for your sake, I will wander through the wilderne….

Most of the time in our world, truth is just opinion..

I believe this. When we meet those we fall in love with, there is an aspect of our spirit that is historian, a bit of a pedant who reminisces or reme….