“One of the very first things I figured out about life…is that it’s better to be a hopeful person than a cynical, grumpy one, because you have to live in the same world either way, and if you’re hopeful, you have more fun.”

I’m widest awake as a writer doing something new, engaged in a process I’m not sure I can finish, generating at the edge of my powers. Some people bungee jump; I write.

When moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that’s awfully hard not to poke.

Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.

A dog can’t think that much about what he’s doing, he just does what feels right.

There were two things about Mama. One is she always expected the best out of me. And the other is that then no matter what I did, whatever I came home with, she acted like it was the moon I had just hung up in the sky and plugged in all the stars. Like I was that good.

Because I write fiction that is based in the real world, it’s going to lead people into some of the modern dilemmas and concerns and even catastrophes that they will think about in a new way.

Listen. Slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward. You are afraid you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember.

It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn’t.

Why is it that only girls stand on the sides of their feet? As if they’re afraid to plant themselves?

There was a roaring in my ears and I lost track of what they were saying. I believe it was the physical manifestation of unbearable grief.

This is how moths speak to each other. They tell their love across the fields by scent. There is no mouth, the wrong words are impossible, either a mate is there or he is not, and if so the pair will find each other in the dark.

A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away, and it is one part rapture.

Honk if you love Jesus, text while driving if you want to meet up.

Our house is like an empty cigarette packet, lying around reminding you what’s not in it.

Our childhood had passed over into history overnight. The transition was unnoticed by anyone but ourselves.

the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners

This high proportion of history’s decisive campaigns, the significance of which is enhanced by the comparative rarity of the direct approach, enforces the conclusion that the indirect is by far the most hopeful and economic form of strategy.

The world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities.

In turn, we will be tempted to kill our computers, but we won’t dare because we are already utterly, irreversibly dependent on these hopeful monsters that make modern life possible.

We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.

So that when it was time to shoot I could hopefully exhale [ Harriet Tubman ].

New York was a new and strange world. Vast, impersonal, merciless.

The impulse to travel is one of the hopeful symptoms of life.

Always before I had felt like a person, an individual, hopeful that I could mold my life according to some desire of my own.