That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.

Nuance is anathema to his thinking, which is why he can maintain such fidelity to his ideas in a-hundred-and-forty-character bursts.

Narrative secrets are not the same as human mysteries, a lesson that novelists seem fates to forget, again and again; the former quickly confess themselves, and fall silent, while the true mysteries go on speaking.

The brevity of our lives breeds a kind of temporal parochialism—an ignorance of or an indifference to those planetary gears which turn more slowly than our own.