The idea of a library full of books, the books full of knowledge, fills me with fear and love and courage and endless wonder.

Do not trust an architect: he will always try to talk you into an atrium.

Can I tell you something? It wasn’t so bad. Not so bad at all right then, me scowling at the dirt, James in his bed, the way it always always was. Look, if that’s all...

Here’s what I think: when you’re born, you’re assigned a brain like you’re assigned a desk, a nice desk, with plenty of pigeonholes and drawers and secret compartments. At the start, it’s empty, and then...

Despite popular theories, I believe people fall in love based not on good looks or fate but on knowledge. Either they are amazed by something a beloved knows that they themselves do not know; or...

Whatever you have lost there are more of, just not yours.

Fearlessness is an accounting trick. You feel the fear; you just defer it. I could stand on the cliff immobile, feeling terrified, or I could leap and feel the terror while falling.

When I was a teenager in Boston, a man on the subway handed me a card printed with tiny pictures of hands spelling out the alphabet in sign language. I AM DEAF, said the card....

Welcome to the world of grown-ups. You might be good at math, and somebody pays for tht, but what you really love to do is sing. Do you think Oscar prizes above all else his...

I’m so sorry,” he said, because after Pamela died, he promised himself that if anyone told him the smallest, saddest story, he would answer, I’m so sorry. Meaning, Yes, that happened. You couldn’t believe the...

Perhaps it goes without saying that I believe in the geographic cure. Of course you can’t out-travel sadness. You will find it has smuggled itself along in your suitcase. It coats the camera lens, it...

Grief lasts longer than sympathy, which is one of the tragedies of the grieving.

All I can say is, it’s a sort of kinship, as though there is a family tree of grief. On this branch, the lost children, on this the suicided parents, here the beloved mentally ill...

My memories are not books. They are only stories that I have been over so many times in my head that I don’t know from one day to the next what’s remembered and what’s made...