"It's really unfair to working women in America who read celebrity news and think, 'Why can't I lose weight when I've had a baby?' Well, everyone you're reading about has money for a trainer and a chef. That doesn't make it realistic."

"I have the feeling when I write poetry that I'm doing what I'm supposed to do. You don't think about whether you're going to get money or fame you just do it."

"All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered."

"People took what they wanted, they clutched at coincidences, the few there were, and made a life from them. . . . Choices are made in brief seconds and paid for in the time that remains."

"Life is an extraordinary gift some people appear not to appreciate. In every breath and scent, every touch and sight we are gifted by new experience and the chance to feel the richness of experience. Every sound we hear, from the song of a bird to the harshness of an angry voice, is a miracle."

"If a boat is shattered by a storm, the desperate passengers cling to the floating pieces of the hull. In that moment, it's not a broken boat. To a drowning man, it's a floating miracle."

"For grief has always been so dear to you that you would make me writhing in pain in the brothel of your imaginations than to be playing with a bunch of balloons in the yard where I should have been.'And may be that's why, you'd rather talk to me about this, than to write a story about me where I could live happily."

"Lettie shrugged. “Nobody actually looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that. It’s true of everybody."