“It’s hard to say goodbye to the place you’ve lived. It can be as hard as saying goodbye to a person.”

Every night before putting her to sleep, Yankel counts her ribs, as if one might have disappeared in the course of the day and become the seed and soil for some new companion to steal her away from him.

I woke up once in the middle of the night, and Buckminster’s paws were on my eyelids. He must have been feeling my nightmares.

I felt suddenly shy. I was not used to shy. I was used to shame. Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want. Shame is when you turn your head away from something you do not want.

The hardest part of writing is not to get the ideas but to remember, why it is important to get them.

She extended a hand that I didn’t know how to take, so I broke its fingers with my silence.

There are only some many times you can utter “It does not hurt” before it begins to hurt even more than the hurt.

We are lying to ourselves and to each other. Lying about what? I don’t care if we’re lying. I am a bad person. I don’t care. I don’t care what you are.

While it is always possible to wake a person who’s sleeping, no amount of noise will wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.

I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love.

You do not have to utter anything you do not want to utter,” I told her, and she said, “Then I would never utter another word again.” “You do not have to do anything that you do not want to do.” “Then I would never do anything again.

When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much.

There’s nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.

I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time.

Words are capable of making experience more vivid, and also of organizing it. They can scare us, and they can comfort us.

If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand.

Worthy would-be worlds of words, whorls of working wonder.