“There is no point treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, ‘There now, hang on, you’ll get over it.’ Sadness is more or less like a head cold- with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.”

Humans can be fairly ridiculous animals.

I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I’d written.

Memories do not always soften with time; some grow edges like knives.

I’ve seen how you can’t learn anything when you’re trying to look like the smartest person in the room.

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

If it’s important, your heart remembers.

It’s frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.

They all attended Hester’s church, which Dellarobia viewed as a complicated pyramid scheme of moral debt and credit resting ultimately on the shoulders of the Lord, but rife with middle managers.

High fashion has the shelf life of potato salad. And when past its prime, it is similarly deadly.

The moth settled onto the curtain and sat still. It was an astonishing creature, with black and white wings patterned in geometric shapes, scarlet underwings, and a fat white body with black spots running down it like a snowman’s coal buttons.

When I want to take God at his word exactly, I take a peep out the window at His creation. Because that, darling, He makes fresh for us everyday.

Global commerce is driven by a single conviction: the inalienable right to earn profit, regardless of any human cost.

You can’t replace people you love with other people…But you can trust that you’re not going to run out of people to love.

Will you explain to me why people encourage delusional behaviour in children, and medicate it in adults?

There is no perfect time to write. There is only now.

You can be as earnest and ridiculous as you need to be, if you don’t attempt it in isolation. The ridiculously earnest are known to travel in groups. And they are known to change the world.