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.

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

...all serious daring starts from within.

He, who had once been the declared optimist, had not once expressed hope. Now it was she who was offering it to him. And it might be false hope.

I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or to be read to.

The future story writer in the child I was must have taken unconscious note and stored it away then: one secret is liable to be revealed in the place of another that is harder to tell, and the substitute secret when nakedly exposed is often the more appalling.

But happiness, Albert knew, is something that appears to you suddenly, that is meant for you, a thing which you reach for and pick up and hide at your breast, a shiny thing that reminds you of something alive and leaping.

Memory returned like spring, Laurel thought. Memory had the character of spring. In some cases, it was the old wood that did the blooming.

It is memory that is the somnambulist. It will come back in its wounds from across the world, like Phil, calling us by our names and demanding its rightful tears. It will never be impervious. The memory can be hurt, time and again – but in that may lie its final mercy. As long as it’s vulnerable to the living moment, it lives for us, and while it lives, and while we are able, we can give it up its due.

A little girl lay flung back in her mother’s lap as though sleep had struck her with a blow.