Her father left his questions unasked. But both knew, and for the same reason, that bad days go better without any questions at all.

Never think you've seen the last of anything.

The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order the continuous thread of revelation.

Writers and travelers are mesmerized alike by knowing of their destinations.

What I do in the writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart and skin of a human being who is not myself. It is the act of a writer's imagination that I set the most high.

Human life is fiction's only theme.

Every story teaches me how to write it. Unfortunately, it doesn't teach me how to write the next one.

The first thing we see about a short story is its mystery. And in the best short stories, we return at the last to see mystery again.

A thing is incredible, if ever, only after it is told--returned to the world it came out of.

No blur of inexactness, no cloud of vagueness, is allowable in good writing from the first seeing to the last putting down, there must be steady lucidity and uncompromising of purpose.

I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them -- with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself.

The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive.

When I was a child and the snow fell, my mother always rushed to the kitchen and made snow ice cream and divinity fudge-egg whites, sugar and pecans, mostly. It was a lark then and I always associate divinity fudge with snowstorms.

Out of love you can speak with straight fury.

A thing is incredible, if ever, only after it is told -- returned to the world it came out of.

People are mostly layers of violence and tenderness wrapped like bulbs, and it is difficult to say what makes them onions or hyacinths.

For the source of the short story is usually lyrical. And all writers speak from, and speak to, emotions eternally the same in all of us: love, pity, terror do not show favorites or leave any of us out.

Laurel could not see her face but only the back of her neck, the most vulnerable part of anybody, and she thought: Is there any sleeping person you can be entirely sure you have not misjudged?

The mystery lies in the use of language to express human life.

I'm a great reader that never has time to read.