Living a life is not the same as writing a book, and it got me thinking about the relationship between what we know and what we can put on paper.

The journey from the head to hand is perilous and lined with bodies. It is the road on which nearly everyone who wants to write—and many of the people who do write—get lost.

Forgiveness. The ability to forgive oneself. Stop here for a few breaths and think about this because it is the key to making art, and very possibly the key to finding any semblance of happiness in life.

I think that what influences us in literature comes less from what we love and more from what we happen to pick up in moments when we are especially open.

There are two types of people in the world: those who want to be cops more than anything and believe that everyone else secretly wants to be a cop as well, and those who cannot imagine it. Twenty-nine of the first sort are in my PAT group, and one of the second.

Sometimes it is the wonderful life, the life of abundant friends and extended family and true love, that makes you want to run screaming for the hills.

I did not have the smallest twinge of guilt about lying on the sofa for days at a time, reading. Could there be anything better than that? I felt as if I had spent the year in one of those total-immersion language camps, and in the end I emerged fluent in the language of short fiction.

Hard work is first and foremost hard, and whether or not it’s ultimately rewarding is very rarely the thing you’re thinking of at the moment.

There are always those perfect times with the people we love, those moments of joy and equality that sustain us later on. I am living that time with my husband now. I try to study our happiness so that I will be able to remember it in the future, just in case something happens and we find ourselves in need. These moments are the foundation upon which we build the house that will shelter us into our final years, so that when love calls out, “How far would you go for me?” you can look it in the eye and say truthfully, “Farther than you would ever have thought was possible.”

The story of my marriage, which is the great joy and astonishment of my life, is too much like a fairy tale—the German kind, unsweetened by Disney.

Is it possible that anxiety ends at the moment when we no longer have time for it? I had waited to marry Karl until I thought he was going to die. At night we’d lie in bed in the dark holding hands. “I’m such an idiot,” I said. “We should have done this a long time ago.” “It’s exactly the right time,” Karl said.

The love between humans is the thing that nails us to this earth.

Sometimes love does not have the most honorable beginnings, and the endings, the endings will break you in half. It’s everything in between we live for.

I know God made us but I’m not so sure about what happens afterwards.” “What do you want to happen?” I ask her. This she knows the answer to immediately. It is as if she has been waiting her entire lifetime for someone to ask her. “I want God to hold me,” she says.