“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.”

I personally am inclined to approach [housework] the way governments treat dissent: ignore it until it revolts.

I don’t bring expectations to any of my books. I don’t tell people what to do. I want to invite them in.

Silence has many advantages…I write and draw in my notebook and I read anything I please.

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.

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.

I think that what we want to do as we continue to move forward is look at the various points that have been made.

This time you’ve dug yourself an anchor too heavy to move ahead with.

When neither high purpose nor the categorical imperatives of religion will do, the only argument against suicide is life itself.

In life you are either growing or rotting. You’re moving forward or backwards; there is no standing still.

In a world moving so fast, with the growth of technology and information,

While she cut the mushrooms, she cried more than she had at the grave.

In the United States businessmen often do not trust their colleagues.

There is something that might be called cinematic beauty. It can only be expressed in a film, and it must be present for that film to be a moving work.