To Walk Into A Modern-day Bookstore Is

Only Later Did I Come To Understand That To Be A Mother Is To Be An Illusion. No Matter How Vigilant, In The End A Mother Can't Protect Her Child - Not From Pain, Or Horror, Or The Nightmare Of Violence, From Sealed Trains Moving Rapidly In The Wrong Direction, The Depravity Of Strangers, Trapdoors, Abysses, Fires, Cars In The Rain, From Chance.

What Interests Me In Writing A Novel Is Taking Really Remote Voices, Characters, And Stories And Beginning To Create Some Kind Of Web.

She Was Gone, And All That Was Left Was The Space You'd Grown Around Her, Like A Tree That Grows Around A Fence. For A Long Time, It Remained Hollow. Years, Maybe. And When At Last It Was Filled Again, You Knew That The New Love You Felt For A Woman Would Have Been Impossible Without Alma. If It Weren't For Her, There Would Never Have Been An Empty Space, Or The Need To Fill It.

The Unique Thing That Literature Provides Is To Be Able To Step So Fully Into Another Situation And Condition.

I Knew That To Find And To Feel Yoav Again Would Be Terribly Painful, Because Of What Had Become Of Him, And Because Of What I Knew He Could Ignite In Me, A Vitality That Was Excruciating Because Like A Flare It Lit Up The Emptiness Inside Me And Exposed What I Always Secretly Knew About Myself: How Much Time I'd Spent Being Only Partly Alive, And How Easily I'd Accepted A Lesser Life.