The hardest lesson is Clare’s solitude. Sometimes I come home and Clare seems kind of irritated; I’ve interrupted some train of thought, broken into the dreary silence of her day. Sometimes I see an expression...

Love the world and yourself in it, move through it as though it offers no resistance, as though the world is your natural element.

I go to sleep alone, and wake up alone. I take walks. I work until I’m tired. I watch the wind play with the trash that’s been under the snow all winter. Everything seems simple...

Wanting to please, worrying that she will see me as I really am. But wanting to be known. That is…you’re naked, moaning in the dark, no dignity at all…I wanted her to see me and...

one of the best and the most painful things about time traveling has been the opportunity to see my mother alive.

Sleep is my lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion.

When we were that young we invented the world, no one could tell us a thing.

When I am out there, in time, I am inverted, changed into a desperate version of myself. I become a thief, a vagrant, an animal who runs and hides. I startle old women and amaze...

Right now we are here, and nothing can mar our perfection, or steal the joy of this perfect moment.

Now I wonder if it means that the future is a place, or like a place, that I could go to; that is go to in some way otherthan just getting older.

I sit quietly and think about my mom. It’s funny how memory erodes, If all I had to work from were my childhood memories, my knowledge of my mother would be faded and soft, with...

I breathe slowly and deeply. I make my eyes still under eyelids, I make my mind still, and soon, Sleep, seeing a perfect reproduction of himself, comes to be united with his facsimile.

I am afraid of the future; it seems to be a big box waiting for me.

I raise my head and see a red illuminated EXIT sign and as my eyes adjust I see tigers, cavemen with long spears, cavewomen wearing strategically modest skins, wolfish dogs. My heart is racing and...

Clare, I want to tell you, again, I love you. Our love has been the thread through the labyrinth, the net under the high-wire walker, the only real thing in this strange life of mine...

Knowing the future is different from being told what I like.

We are often insane with happiness. We are also very unhappy for reasons neither of us can do anything about. Like being separated.

I sleep all day. Noises flit around the house- garbage truck in the alley, rain, tree rapping against the bedroom window. I sleep. I inhabit sleep firmly, willing it, wielding it, pushing away dreams, refusing,...

The compelling thing about making art—or making anything, I suppose—is the moment when the vaporous, insubstantial idea becomes a solid there, a thing, a substance in a world of substances. Circe, Nimbue, Artemis, Athena, all...

When I began writing The Night Bookmobile, it was a story about a woman’s secret life as a reader. As I worked it also became a story about the claims that books place on their...

Don’t you think it’s better to be extremely happy for a short while, even if you lose it, than to be just okay for your whole life?

That is what madness is, isn’t it? All the wheels fly off the bus and things don’t make sense any more. Or rather, they do, but it’s not a kind of sense anyone else can...

I think about my mother singing after lunch on a Summer afternoon, twirling in blue dress across the floor of her dressing room

I make books because I love them as objects; because I want to put the pictures and the words together, because I want to tell a story.

Mama said, “Dreams are different to real life but important too.

Chicago has so much excellent architecture that they feel obliged to tear some of it down now and then and erect terrible buildings just to help us all appreciate the good stuff.

I am suddenly comsumed by nostalgia for the little girl who was me, who loved the fields and believed in God, who spent winter days home sick from school reading Nancy Drew and sucking menthol...

To world enough and time.

You can still be cool when you’re dead. In fact, it’s much easier, because you aren’t getting old and fat and losing your hair.

I love you always. Time is nothing.

Each spine was an encapsulated memory, each book represented hours, days of pleasure, of immersion into words.

The only thing we can do is to say ‘Fuck it’ over and over again, really loud, until someone stops us.

There are several ways to react to being lost. One is to panic: this was usually Valentina’s first impulse. Another is to abandon yourself to lostness, to allow the fact that you’ve misplaced yourself to...

I never understood why Clark Kent was so hell bent on keeping Lois Lane in the dark.

…all of our laments could not add a single second to her life, not one additional beat of the heart, nor a breath.

Think for a minute, darling: in fairy tales it’s always the children who have the fine adventures. The mothers have to stay at home and wait for the children to fly in the window.

I won’t ever leave you, even though you’re always leaving me.

When the woman you live with is an artist, every day is a surprise. Clare has turned the second bedroom into a wonder cabinet, full of small sculptures and drawings pinned up on every inch...

I don’t know what to say to this Clare who is old and young and different from other girls, who knows that different might be hard.

Our love has been the thread through thelabyrinth, the net under the high-wire walker, the only real thing in this strange life of mine that I could ever trust.

You’re my phantom limb, Mouse. I keep looking for you. I forget. I feel stupid, Mouse. Haunt me, find me, come back from wherever you are. Be with me.

Even her name seemed empty, as though it had detached itself from her and was floating untethered in his mind. How am I supposed to live without you? It was not a matter of the...

I want my own bed, in my own apartment. Home sweet home. No place like home. Take me home, country roads. Home is where the heart is. But my heart is here. So I must...

There is only one page left to write on. I will fill it with words of only one syllable. I love. I have loved. I will love.

And so the twins had remained virgins. Julia and Valentina watched all of their high school and college friends disappear one by one into the adult world of sex, until they were the only people...

He would say her name over and over until it devolved into meaningless sounds – mah REI kuh, mah REI kuh – it became an entry in a dictionary of loneliness.

After my mom died she ate my father up completely. She would have hated it. Every minute of his life since then has been marked by her absence, every action has lacked dimension because she...

We come to a house and walk down the small walkway to its backyard. In the yard there are two screens and a slide projector. People are seated in lawn chairs, watching slides of trees.

The choices we’re working with here are a block universe, where past, present and future all coexist simultaneously and everything has already happened; chaos, where anything can happen and nothing can be predicted because we...

Why do you have a cigarette lighter in your glove compartment?” her husband, Jack, asked her. “I’m bored with knitting. I’ve taken up arson