"Mothers always find ways to fit in the work - but then when you're working, you feel that you should be spending time with your children and then when you're with your children, you're thinking about working."

"The original fairy tale was about the youngest sister going into a room in the castle and finding all the bodies of the wives that came before her - she is confronted with truth, thinking about how often we think we know people and we really don't."

"Shelby watched the books burn. She wonders if words are pouring down on other people's houses,sad words, like beast and mourn and sorrow and mother."

"Sam said, Hey, you want to get high? Amy had taken his words to mean You are so beautiful I am undone by you."

"Once I knew nothing about McKay and now I knew everything about him. This seemed as good as any reason for not walking out the door. There are so many ways to stop the knowing, and I tried them all. I tried silence, I tried heroin, I tried calling it love. And then I stopped trying to call my dumbness any one of ten thousand names."

"I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist."

"Even as a small child, I understood that woman had secrets, and that some of these were only to be told to daughters. In this way we were bound together for eternity."

"Certain things need not be said, and there's nothing, not a whisper, prayer, not a sacrifice, not a payment of any price, that would change what's about to happen."

"I must keep my head and not give in to desire, for desire is what causes women to drown."

"She had been grief stricken as her father lay dying but now she felt weightless, the way people do when they're no longer sure they have a reason to be connected to this world. The slightest breeze could have carried her away, into the night sky, across the universe."

"Children would beg for a peppermint drop each time he walked into town, and they'd follow behind, asking for a second and a third. When he died suddenly, while working late at his office, every boy and girl in the village reported smelling mint in the night air, as if somehing sweet had passed them right by."

"It was amazing how many colors there were, all running into the gutter in a stream: a dozen shades of blue, twenty different reds, and all that black soot, like a nightmare given form, the insides of a heart, destroyed so easily, done away with before anyone could stop the damage, or salvage what was lost, or even try to save him."

"But in battle you cannot tell another when it is his time to enter the World-to-Come, nor is it possible to keep any man in this world when he wishes to leave it behind."

"What was a demon but a lost soul, one that had been forced to use his skills to survive."

"A man always revealed his own inner story in his actions and expressions. A man's past deeds foretold his future and allowed anyone with half a brain to divine the path he would take."

"She has an eye for tragedy and sorrow. Show her a rose and she'll see only the wasp in the center of the bloom."

"This was the purest instant he had ever experienced; the way he felt inside right then. If he had to be trapped in a forever he would choose this very moment. The black night, the few yellow leaves still clinging to the bare trees, the beautiful dark-eyed woman drinking whiskey, the way she gazed at him, the way she made him feel."

"You can get addicted to trouble if you're not careful."

"You can try to take sorrow and make it into something enduring, meaningful and beautiful. I always feel guilty that this is my job, that I get to do this."

"Feelings are best left concealed. They can bite you if you're not careful. They can eat you alive."

"You want to know what love is? Its the thing that ruins you."

"For six months I did what women do: I waited. This is what women are taught to be good at. It's said that a woman's life is merely preparation for the primal nine-month wait. Whatever the reason, they do it well. Sometimes they drink or bite their fingernails down to the wrist. They count stars and initials and wait: for something to happen, for something to pass, to change, to begin, to end."

"I think we are bound to, and by, nature. We may want to deny this connection and try to believe we control the external world, but every time there's a snowstorm or drought, we know our fate is tied to the world around us."

"Before she can stop herself, she thinks about desire, how it lives within you and yet is separate, surfacing when it chooses, without permission, in the harsh afternoon light, at the moment when you least expect to find it."

"Our house was littered with books- in the kitchen, under the beds, stuck between the couch pillows--far too many for her the ever finish. I suppose I thought if my grandmother kept up her interests, she wouldn't die; she'd have to stay around to finish the books she was so fond of. "I've got to get to the bottom of this one," she'd say, as if a book were no different from a pond or a lake. I thought she'd go on reading forever but it didn't work out that way."

"He had a way of taking your hand which made it clear he'd have to be the one to let go."From Alice Hoffman's "Local Girls", pg.102."

"You should never trust a liar so you should never trust a man of honor. Those two are the worst of mankind."

"Love someone and they're yours forever."

"I'm trying to find someone who doesn't want to be found.""That can be as hard as looking for a shadow."

"Jill and I have known each other our whole lives. One house separates our houses but we act as if it doesn't exist. We met before we were born and we'll probably still know each other after we die. At least, that's the way we're planning it."

"I wasn't good company, that was true, and people avoided me, but that was all right. I was too busy dreaming."

"It was a miracle to live as birds do, except for one thing: anyone seen in flight would surely be captured, perhaps even shot down like a crow flying above a cornfield. It's always dangerous to be different, to appear as a monster in most people's eyes, even from a distance."

"He was withdrawing. I think it was getting harder for him to accept his fate. Like a bird in a cage, he grew silent."

"There is the outside of a story, and the inside of a story... One is the fruit and may be delicious, but the other is the seed."

"It was a great escape for me and it was a way to take a break from what was going on in my own world, to go into another world."

"Stone should last forever, but on that night I came to understand that a stone was only another form of dust. Streams of holy dust loomed in the air, and every breath included remnants of the Temple, so that we inhaled that which was meant to stand through eternity."

"Demons were said to be cruel, but a demon would never have been so brutal as this. A demon merely called you by name, threw his arms around you, whispered his plight, understood yours, then took you for his own."

"In a novel, you'll find yourself in a world of possibilities. You'll find shelter there."

"In good time every secret must be shared and every miracle called into question."

"Hawthorne has given us a tradition that some people refer to as Yankee Magic Realism, and I do think there is a certain quality to the landscape that definitely leads into the dark woods."

"What was desire anyway, when examined in the clear light of day? Was it the way a woman searched for her clothes in the morning, or the manner in which a man might watch her sit before the mirror and comb her hair? Was it a pale November dawn, when ice formed on windowpanes and crows called from the bare black trees? Or was it the way a person might yield to the night, setting forth on a path so unexpected that daylight would never again be completely clear?"

"All the characters in my books are imagined, but all have a bit of who I am in them - much like the characters in your dreams are all formed by who you are."

"Even in times when it's difficult to figure out, how do you go forward, art - and books - always help."

"She allowed me to understand I'd done everything I could for her, and that I, and everyone who loved her, had to step away and go on living.Now I know what she wanted from me on the day she told me she was afraid. It was exactly what I wanted when I had cancer and I thought I was going to die. I should have sat down next to her, put my arms around her, and told her that I loved her. That's all anyone wants. It took me a long time to figure this out. It's a complicated human puzzle. But it's never too late to know that love is all you need."

"I wrote to find beauty and purpose, to know that love is possible and lasting and real, to see day lilies and swimming pools, loyalty and devotion, even though my eyes were closed, and all that surrounded me was a darkened room. I wrote because that was who I was at the core, and if I was too damaged to walk around the block, I was lucky all the same. Once I got to my desk, once I started writing, I still believed anything was possible."

"I understood that fate could not be eluded forever; it came on leathery wings, swooping through the darkness like the bats in the orchards."

"Perhaps I was drawn to stories in which people found their true desires because I was a stranger to myself."

"There is no fiercer enemy than a word. A word that can be written down in pages and punctuated by quotation marks and commas and spelled out in contracts and poems and sighs, in old whispers and song lyrics, in promises and vows."

"I loved him even now, as he took a knife to my throat, as I drowned in blood, as I whispered "Cousin, you were wrong. We were born to live."

"They weren't true stories, they were better than that."