I read so I can live more than one life in more than one place.
I'm beginning to think that maybe it's not just how much you love someone. Maybe what matters is who you are when you're with them.
It is very difficult to live among people you love and hold back from offering them advice.
It is not how much you love someone, but who you are when you are with him.
I've never quite believed that one chance is all I get
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One sad thing about this world is that the acts that take the most out of you are usually the ones that people will never know about. (from 'Celestial Navigation')
People always call it luck when you’ve acted more sensibly than they have.
Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.
It's true that writing is a solitary occupation, but you would be surprised at how much companionship a group of imaginary characters can offer once you get to know them.
People who hadn't suffered a loss yet struck me as not quite grown up.
There is no sound more peaceful than rain on the roof, if you're safe asleep in someone else's house.
It struck her all at once that dealing with other human beings was an awful lot of work.
When you have children, you're obligated to live.
Ever consider what pets must think of us? I mean, here we come back from a grocery store with the most amazing haul - chicken, pork, half a cow. They must think we're the greatest hunters on earth!
He wished he had inhabited more of his life, used it better, filled it fuller.
Bravest thing about people is how they go on loving mortal beings after finding out there's such a thing as dying.
But if you never did anything you couldn't undo you'd end up doing nothing at all.
She was good at talking with young people. She seemed to view them as interesting foreigners.
It seems to me that since I've had children, I've grown richer and deeper. They may have slowed down my writing for a while, but when I did write, I had more of a self to speak from.
If I waited till I felt like writing, I'd never write at all.
...it's closeness that does you in. Never get too close to people, son.
They were like people who run to meet, holding out their arms, but their aim is wrong; they pass each other and keep running.
There is no true life. Your true life is the one you end up with, whatever it may be. You just do the best you can with what you've got.
He was wondering if there was some cryptic, cultish mark on his door that told all the crazy people he'd have trouble saying no.
I'm falling into disrepair
That was one of the worst things about losing your wife, I found: your wife is the very person you want to discuss it all with.
But it was easier, somehow, to reflect on them all from a distance than to be struggling for room in their midst.
You’re only ever as happy as your least happy child?’
The trouble with dying,” she’d told Jeannie once, “is that you don’t get to see how everything turns out. You won’t know the ending.
But it has occurred to me, on occasion, that our memories of our loved ones might not be the point. Maybe the point is their memories—all that they take away with them.
