Then she had been a fiancee, a young wife, and a mother, and she had discovered that these words were far too small ever to contain the experience.
I love to swim, and I love being near water.
Your understanding of a place changes the longer you stay; you discover more, and your own life gets woven into the fabric of the community.
Its impossible to control the reception of your work – the only thing you can control is the experience of writing itself, and the work you create.
My first job was in a nursing home – a terrible place in retrospect. It was in an old house, and the residents were so lonely. People rarely visited them. I only stayed there a couple of months, but it made a strong impression on me.
The Lake of Dreams grew gradually, over many years, elements and ideas accruing until they gained enough critical mass to become a novel.
I think that the whole child welfare system has to be totally taken apart and built up again. Have an agency just specifically for those follow-up cases.
Writing is always a process of discovery – I never know the end, or even the events on the next page, until they happen. There’s a constant interplay between the imagining and shaping of the story.
A moment was not a single moment at all, but rather an infinite number of different moments, depending on who was seeing things and how.
That there were other worlds, invisible, unknown, beyond imagination even, was a revelation to him.
He wished he had some kind of X-ray vision for the human heart.
Away from the bright motion of the party, she carried her sadness like a dark stone clenched in her palm.
She had died at age twelve, and by now she was nothing but the memory of love – nothing, now, but bones.
This is what he knew that Paul didn’t: the world was precarious and sometimes cruel. He’d had to fight hard to achieve what Paul simply took for granted.
You missed a lot of heartache, sure. But David, you missed a lot of joy.
He had never even glimpsed her.
This was her life. Not the life she had once dreamed of, not a life her younger self would ever have imagined or desired, but the life she was living, with all its complexities. This was her life, built with care and attention, and it was good.
She didn’t love him and he didn’t love her; she was like an addiction, and what they were doing had a darkness to it, a weight.
So something had begun, and now she could not stop it. Twin threads ran through her: fear and excitement. She could leave this place today. She could start a new life somewhere else.
They turned a distracted gaze on the world, wide-eyed, somehow, and questioning.