Quotes

The words of our childhood became strangers to us- we couldn't use them in the same way and so we chose not to use them at all. Life demanded a new language.

Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.

When I got older I decided I wanted to be a real writer. I tried to write about real things. I wanted to describe the world, because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely.

The windows in my bedroom face east and have no curtains, and to wake up into that light and a book is joy as I know it.

Everything is an old story, even what we think of as the "self" is just a narrative that our parents began telling when we were born, of which we take up authorship.

My mother is English, and as she was the one who read to us, my early world was A.A. Milne, Beatrix Potter, Kenneth Grahame, Lewis Carroll and Roald Dahl. None of them thought it necessary to protect children from darkness. On the contrary, they guided their readers right toward it. This gives one an enormous sense of being respected as a child. Not just of being trusted to handle things as they are, but to be accepted as not entirely good. To be recognized as having darkness within oneself, too. I don't think I've trusted any author since who doesn't address me with that assumption.

Sometimes I forget that the world is not on the same schedule as I. That everything is not dying, or that if it is dying it will return to life, what with a little sun and the usual encouragement.

Sometimes I think: I am older than this tree, older than this bench, older than the rain. And yet... I'm not older than the rain. It's been falling for years and after I go it will keep on falling.