Two-thirty comes during Testifying. It’s Janine, telling about how she was gang-raped at fourteen and had an abortion.But whose fault was it? Aunt Helena says, holding up one plump finger. Her fault, her fault, her...

Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself through a window clouded with dew. Romance means leaving things out: where life grunts and shuffles, romance only sighs.

So we couldn’t mingle with them, but we could eavesdrop. We got our knowledge that way–we caught it like germs.

From her handbag she takes a round gilt compact with violets on the cover. She opens it, unclosing her other self, and runs her fingertip around the corners of her mouth, left one, right one;...

He keeps his voice kindly but remote. A cross between a pedagogue, soothsayer, and a benevolent uncle – that should be his tone.

What would that be like – to long, to yearn for someone who is right there before your eyes, day in and day out?

They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing.

With the young writers now it’s F and C all day long, which he, personally, finds boring.

Or he’d watch the news: more plagues, more famines, more floods, more insect or microbe or small-mammal outbreaks, more droughts, more chickenshit boy-soldier wars in distant countries. Why was everything so much like itself?

You’re never going to kill storytelling, because it’s built into the human plan. We come with it.

People use technology only to mean digital technology. Technology is actually everything we make.

Genres aren’t closed boxes. Stuff flows back and forth across the borders all the time.

I have been known to buy e-versions of my books because I was in a hotel room and I needed one right away to look up something in it; very handy for that – you...

The Eskimo has fifty-two names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love.

More powerful than God, more evil than the Devil; the poor have it, the rich lack it, and if you eat it you die?

But if you happen to be a man, sometime in the future, and you’ve made it this far, please remember: you will never be subjected to the temptation of feeling you must forgive, a man,...

Genius is an infinite capacity for causing pain.

Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.

You might even provide a Heaven for them. We need You for that. Hell we can make for ourselves.

This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.

Even sex was no longer what it had once been, though he was still as addicted to it as ever. He felt jerked around by his own dick, as if the rest of him was...

But thoughtless ingratitude is the armour of the young; without it, how would they ever get through life? The old wish the young well, but they wish them ill also: they would like to eat...

I wasn’t even sure I wanted a man in my life again; by that time I’d exhausted the notion that the answer to a man is another man, and I was out of breath.

Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.

It is shocking how many crimes the Bible contains. The Governor’s wife should cut them all out and paste them into her scrapbook.

Before the Civil War, Canada was at the top of the underground railroad. If you made it into Canada, you were safe unless someone came and hauled you back. That was also true during the...

If it’s all instruction, you get annoyed with it and bored, and you stop reading. If it’s all entertainment, you read it quite quickly, your heart going pitty-pat, pitty-pat. But when you finish, that’s it....

Communications technology changes possibilities for communication, but that doesn’t mean it changes the inherited structure of the brain. So you may think that you’re addicted to online reading, but as soon as it isn’t available...

The thing about delirium is you think it’s great, but it actually isn’t.

He was deciding whether to cut her throat or love her forever.

Put yourself in a different room, that’s what the mind is for.

[Northrop] Frye was concerned mostly with literary criticism, and myths interested him as structural elements in works of literature. He used the word myth to mean story, without attaching any connotation of truth or falsehood...

Knowing this secret, being the only one chosen to know, makes me feel important in a way. But it’s a negative importance, it’s the importance of a blank sheet of paper. I can know because...

Who is to say that prayers have any effect? On the other hand, who is to say they don’t? I picture the gods, diddling around on Olympus, wallowing in the nectar and ambrosia and the...

So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it’s the hardest to do anything with. That’s about all that can be said...

For me the experience of writing is really an experience of losing control.… I think it’s very much like dreaming or like surfing. You go out there and wait for a wave, and when it...

In my dreams of this city I am always lost.

As Charles Darwin said, ‘The economy shown by Nature in her resources is striking,’ says the Spirit. ‘All wealth comes from Nature. Without it, there wouldn’t be any economics. The primary wealth is food, not...

Of course (said Oryx), having a money value was no substitute for love. Every child should have love, every person should have it. . . . but love was undependable, it came and then it...

There were places you didn’t want to walk, precautions you took that had to do with locks on windows and doors, drawing the curtains, leaving on lights. These things you did were like prayers; you...

People always forget about prophecies unless they come true.

Lilies used to be a movie theatre, before. Students went there a lot; every spring they had a Humphrey Bogart festival, with Lauren Bacall or Katherine Hepburn, women on their own, making up their minds....

Storytelling is a very old human skill that gives us an evolutionary advantage. If you can tell young people how you kill an emu, acted out in song or dance, or that Uncle George was...

I tend to feel if people say they’re going to do something, they will, if given the chance.

There’s a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That’s what writers do when they’re good.

Some bioengineering is good, especially if it results in plants that are more drought-resistant or perennial food crops.

Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where...

Something is unfolding, being revealed to me. I see that there’s a whole world of of girls and their doings that has been unknown to me, and that I can be part of without making...

The objects I chose were designed to hold something, but I didn’t fill them up. They remained empty. They were little symbolic shrines to thirst.

You believed you could transcend the body as you aged, she tells herself. You believed you could rise above it, to a serene, nonphysical realm. But it’s only through ecstasy you can do that, and...